Banks suck @ss, they don't give a crap about regular customers - they only care about the bank owners. Credit unions, by definiton, are owned by their customers, so as long as they aren't one of the huge CUs that have started to forget their mission and act like a bank, they will be a LOT easier to work with. See if you can find a local credit union that you can join and find out what they can do for you instead.

Here's one decent place to find out about credit unions:

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/rate/creditunion_home.asp

but they aren't the be-all and the end-all to CU information either (their website is BANKrate.com not CUrate.com)