I HAD BEEN on the midnight

mail crew at First Pennsylvania Bank for two weeks before I found out who I was working for.

The veil fell from my eyes on payday. First Pennsy didn't issue paychecks. They issued statements on the checking accounts that we had been required to open when we were hired.

Mine showed that I had written checks for about $15 or $20 more than the bank had paid me. My bad.

I figured they'd reduce my next paycheck by the overdraft amount and I would have learned a costly but valuable lesson.

I figured wrong. Instead they charged a $15 overdraft fee for each of the four checks that came in on the day of the overdraft, even though there was more than enough in the account to cover three of them.

They returned all four checks to my creditors marked "non-sufficient funds." But they did find sufficient funds in my account to cover their $60 fee.

It was then that I realized that not all bank robberies are illegal. Some are just unethical.

Banks call it batch processing, a practice that allows them to regard all of the checks drawn on an account on a given day as one check when they calculate which ones to honor. They become separate checks again when its time to charge overdraft fees.

This was back in the dark ages, before ATMs and point-of- sale transactions with bank-debit cards got to be such profit centers for the banks. It was before the average overdraft fee rose to $27 each.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. estimates that overdraft fees will generate as much as $38.5 billion in revenue this year. It's such a sweet business, banks now provide what they laughingly call "overdraft protection" to people who don't know they have it and wouldn't want it if they did.

This unsolicited overdraft protection is the part that got stuck in U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd's craw. Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, threatened to write a law requring banks to get permission from their customers before granting overdraft protection.

A similar bill was introduced in the House by Rep. Carolyn Maloney. The Federal Reserve is exploring ways to end the practice by regulation.

This flurry of activity resonated all the way up to the executive suites. Suddenly, guys in pinstripe suits were lining up in the revival tent.

People have been complaining about this stuff for at least 40 years that I know about.

But just one week after Dodd's threat, Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase have had an epiphany.

Starting Oct. 19, Bank of America customers will be able to choose to void a sale or an ATM withdrawal that would exceed the amount in their checking accounts right at the point of sale.

Bank of America has also agreed that it will no longer charge overdraft fees on accounts less than $10 in the red. It also will limit the number of overdraft fees to four a day per account.

That reverses a recent Bank of America policy that raised the number of overdraft fees to 10 a day.

J.P. Morgan Chase went even further. It will limit the amount of overdraft fees to three a day. Chase announced that it will no longer charge any fee for accounts that are overdrawn by $5 or less.

Spokesmen for both companies swore up and down that their change of heart had nothing to do with the threatened legislation.

Brian Moynihan, Bank of America's president of consumer and small-business banking, characterized it as just being responsive to consumers.

"I think everybody is listening to the consumer out there," he told the Washington Post this week. The bank just realizes what their customers are going through and "we are figuring out a solution."

Maybe so. But they weren't listening to the crew who worked the midnight shift in the basement of the First Pennsy's operation center at 30th and Market.

A real change of heart must require a higher calling.

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith