Bank Blues

“The moment I cross the threshold of the bank and attempt to transact business there, I become an irresponsible idiot”

“My Financial Career” by Stephen Leacock

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Banks annoyed me, banks irritate me. Banks don’t seem to know what they are doing with my money.
When I first started working, my employer deposited my pay in a particular bank. Which bank? You may well ask. No, not that one.
Anyway, one day I went to the ATM and withdrew my $50 and the ATM spat out a receipt showing that my balance was now $27,000, a huge sum for 1981.
As this was about $26,700 more than I expected, I was surprised, but resigned. After all, I was working as a computer programmer and I knew that the bank’s programmers were probably just as careless as me and so the ATM program was probably faulty. Therefore, I reasoned, the next time I enquired, these unimaginable riches would have disappeared in order to pay the bank CEO’s  next day’s pay.
However the next day I again asked the ATM for an account balance and yes, all that money was still there!
I pushed aside the urge to withdraw all this cash and spend it (I had been thinking of buying a car – a Mini Moke – now I could buy a fleet of Mini Mokes!). So I did the right thing and phoned the bank (you could in those days). I fully expected that Gloria, from the bank head office, would thank me profusely for my honesty and integrity and for her CEO’s next day’s pay. Not a bit of it. Gloria was not especially interested. Maybe it happened quite often, maybe she was the full-time “Customer Whatever Officer”.
Gloria gave me the general impression that she thought I was to blame for the incorrect deposit, and that somehow I had hacked into the bank computer system, illegally deposited two year’s pay and then called them to identify myself as the culprit. Not a word of thanks from Gloria. Not so much as a free money box was offered as a token of gratitude. My two year’s extra pay had vanished by the next banking day. My fleet of Mini Mokes was now a mere (exhaust) pipe-dream.

Recently my wife went to the local bank to sign a VID (Very Important Document). She had only been a customer there for 20 years so the bank staff didn’t know her or trust her. Not really. I think all bank staff do annual professional development training in new methods to complicate the relationship with customers – no wonder the staff turnover is so high in the banking industry. Anyway, my beloved duly signed the Very Important Document and Gloria’s well-trained direct descendant compared the signature with the signature they had kept on file since she was 12 years old and told her “that’s not your signature”.
“Yes it is! You watched me sign it!” my wife countered from the other side of the counter (notice clever pun).
“It’s not yours, it’s different” persisted Gloria’s clone.
“Are you telling me I am not me?” said my wife, never one to let bureaucracy mess with the bleeding obvious.
The philosophical implications of this statement (summarised by Prof. Henry Higgins in his short essay “Why Can’t A Woman Be More Like A Man?” and by Dr Helen Reddy with her riposte “I Am Woman Hear Me Roar”) totally befuddled Gloria’s unnatural descendant.
She admitted that my wife was indeed who she was and so accepted and stamped and scrawled on and filed the Very Important Document.

These days the staff at the bank begrudgingly identify my wife and apart from losing her tax file number every year for the last five years treat her tolerably well.
Banks, what more can I say? What more can anyone say?
I’ll leave the last words to Bob Hope who once said “a bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove you don’t need it”.

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© Geoff Milton 2015