And excuse me for not being as foul as you are.
In my experience, if you don't make overdrafts a habit and you accidentally overdraw your account, the bank will work with you and will reverse the fees if you ask nicely. On the other hand, if you make it a habit to accidentally overdraw your account, then I imagine the bank will want to recover its administrative costs.
I'm a single mom, and I travel a lot in my job so I'm probably more prone to making mistakes than most. I did make a very costly mistake a couple of years ago and ended up bouncing three checks because I wrote them on an account that I closed after my purse was stolen. When I sent my son to go into my closet and grab new checks, I had no idea I even had any checks from that account left, and when the bank left messages on my phone in an attempt to determine whether to honor my checks or not, I was out of town and couldn't be reached.
The upshot? I wrote a bad check to my son's trumpet teacher, who very kindly traded the bad check for a good one. I wrote a bad check to the milkman, and the company worked with me to set things straight at no cost to me. And I wrote a bad check to Pizza Hut, and even though by then, I was well aware of what I'd done and I called the store FIRST to set things right, that bad $17 check cost me over $120 in fees - just over $60 to Pizza Hut and the rest to the collection agency. And I was lucky. It could have been much worse, and if you look at it that way, the $35 fee for the float seems like a bargain. I certainly wasn't happy about the fees, but I can hardly blame Pizza Hut for my mistake. Nor can I blame them for mitigating their risk by pricing their fees to cover all the check amounts that don't get recovered and by turning bounced checks directly over to a collection agency that charges very hefty fees itself.
The bank? They didn't charge me anything, they honored the checks that hadn't cleared after I explained my dilemma, and they were very nice about it to boot.
And I'd rather be smug than be a jerk who refuses to take responsibility for his actions. To each his own, I guess.
