Hey Green! Glad things eventually worked out, as per your update.
I hope that most or more likely all of us are 100% sympathetic with you. It is frustrating to have tremendously bad luck with multiple customer service reps. You are probably knowledgeable enough about statistics to realize that no matter how amazing an institution is on the whole, some lone customer somewhere is gonna have a stroke of really bad luck and have rep after rep make terrible decisions. It just bites being that one customer with the bad luck!
Some lessons learned here:
(1) As frustrating as it is, it's a jillion times worse when you have one bank. My guess is that if you had 2-3 other banks that you did your "real" day to day stuff with, you would have been stressed out much less with this new Chase account. Having the Chase accounts temporarily suspended or frozen would have been mildly irritating but since you didn't use them (yet) for anything it wouldn't have mattered.
We see a similar dynamic at play when a person has only 1-2 credit cards. Mistakes by CSRs in that event become like an asteroid hitting the earth. When you have 5 cards, though, you can just sigh and pull two more out of the sock drawer while the other issuer gets its act together. That happened to me -- curiously enough! -- with Chase recently. My CSR experience with Chase is generally amazing. But they made some mistakes and kept needing to cancel and re-send my two Chase Freedom cards. If those were my only cards I would have been wildly stressed. But as it was it was closer to being water off a duck's back, because I had a number of others.
(2) Related to #1 is the idea that when you open a new bank account (or credit card), plan on not needing to use it for anything important during the first few weeks, while you are let them get all the kinks worked out. In the case of a CC, use it for only a few small benign purchases at local well-known merchants (Target, mcDonalds, Kroger, etc.) -- rather than immediately using it for big online purchases or using it out of state immediately. With banks assume that it may take a while before they are fully convinced that you are not a criminal or other shady character and that any external accounts you have hooked up to it are also kosher.
PS. You write:
I talked to my wife, we will keep this one open for now, get our bonus out of it and see how things go. But we may close their account 90 days from now and go with a credit union or a local bank.
Bear in mind that most banks and CUs have an early termination fee, especially for people who have grabbed a bonus and promptly closed the account. With Chase you will lose the $600 signup bonus if you close before 180 days and might incur an additional ET fee as well. 180 days is the usual rule at most places, though people like myself who make a couple thousand dollars a year from opening and closing bank accounts (bonus chasers) never cut it that close. I typically wait until 220 days have passed.
