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| There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that a solid middle-class citizen, of which I am certainly one, hates worse than to have someone fooling around, unbidden, with his or her money. And yet, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which is chockablock with masses of ever so substantial citizens, of which I am, remember, only one, the banks appear have lost their collective minds and are, gratuitously, playing games with our money.
Let me set the scene for you. The Slow Bank, or Bank A, is about to merge with a Fast Bank, or Bank B. Banks A and B, having courted for at least a year, are on the verge of consummation. The marriage of A and B is not going well from the family (or customer) point of view, nor from the vantage point of the tellers, thousands of which will be pitched upon the compost heap of corporate down- and merger-sizing as soon as the wedding night has passed. I was in the Slow Bank the other day, just visiting my small but dear collection of greenbacks, when I saw signs of distress. Actually, it was only one sign of distress. It said that deposits — yes, that’s deposits, not withdrawals — couldn’t actually be transacted at the Automatic Teller Machine. And maybe not withdrawals, either, as many of the cards upon which we all rely had already stopped working or would stop very shortly. I have, in a rush of unexpected plastic, received three new cards within a couple of weeks. The first wouldn’t work. The second worked. The last in the series said that it wouldn’t work — yet, but when IT started working, the second one would stop. Providing I activated the third one by using it. Otherwise, I couldn’t use it. I am considering cutting all three cards into many, many strips of expensive plastic and depositing them back in the bank where they were born, with a request that neither Slow Bank nor Bank B ever send me any more cards.. Enough is enough. I can’t remember my PIN number, anyway. I just keep the cards around to prove I am really the solid citizen I frequently claim to be.
More suave but equally agitated was the man who wanted to get into his safe deposit box. He murmured, loudly, that the box was apparently a little safer than he had expected since he had been waiting forty-five minutes to get into it. His murmurs were rapidly rising to a shout. Next to me in one of the few chairs, a woman with a wiggly toddler waited a while until the toddler’s wiggles began to be accompanied by loud wails. She left, dragging the toddler behind her as she muttered and there may have been a few tears on her face. Three students began to giggle in line and make some rude comments about the bank and then they left, too. There were still a dozen people queued up, all beginning to look somewhat steamed and almost as wiggly as the toddler. Manning the desks were a couple of tellers and two customer service people, explaining things to increasingly annoyed customers, none of which were used to talking to banks. They were used to punching in their PINs, no conversation needed, zip-zap, put in the card and out comes cash. A miracle! A modern miracle which had unaccountably stopped cooperating. A miracle that had spit back the cards and sat there metallically refusing to take or give anything. Confusion and distress grew ever more intense as the lines grew longer. Finally a teller deserted her post to let that safe deposit seeker into the vault. One hopes someone was available to let him out later, but I didn’t see him leave. A gaggle of suits with briefcases waltzed out of the offices in the back, refusing to meet in the eye either the frustrated customers or the overwhelmed tellers. They appeared to be going out to lunch. Every contact with the slow bank has been like that for weeks. Swipe the card through the gizmo and it says it never heard of you. Then it eats your card. Nervous breakdowns are breaking out all over Massachusetts. I have just gotten another letter from the slow bank and one from the fast bank, advising me that any electronic billing payments probably won’t work unless I notify the companies which are authorized to dip into my account, since the new banking entity will be changing my account number. Not just mine. A whole lot of numbers. On the same day. The lines are growing in Massachusetts and those who have come to depend on ATM machines are not feeling too kindly about the whole situation. It is as if a long, long, power outage had taken our lightbulbs and televisions away. And there is no blizzard outside. Mother Nature had nothing to do with this one. New Year’s was benign, compared to what these banks are doing to us in their self inflicted Y2K crisis. The idea of a bank which is incapable of accepting deposits seems to me to go against the very idea of banking. I always believed, deeply, that the banks were delightedly, deliriously, blissfully, almost indecently happy to take and keep our money and charge us for the privilege of having our personal dimes and twenty-dollar bills to play with. I pictured those bankers as falling all over themselves with glee whenever a deposit slip came sailing toward them. But now that basic premise, which now seems so naive, so obsolete, so downright friendly, has been replaced by the dizzy pleasures of merging. Meanwhile, Bank C, is advertising like mad that they are both willing and able to handle deposits! In spite of the temptations of the seductive Bank C, we must still wish our Slow Bank A and our Fast Bank B well, as we watch them tilting and lurching toward that final moment when they become one. They have our mortgages and our safety deposit boxes and our certificates of deposit and, alas, our ATM cards. The day the numbers all change could be a truly memorable one. We are digging up all our bank statements going back to the year zero. And keeping handy a little bottled water, some canned food, a few batteries, a flashlight, and a little cash under the mattress. Don’t laugh! It could happen to you! |
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So there I was in the Slow Bank, waiting for a Customer Service person to help me with my tiny transaction, and I was lucky enough to have a chair. I was the middle chair and I was pretty calm, but some of my fellow customers weren’t. One was leaning over a desk, imploringly, waving one hand dramatically. Not to get too indelicate about it, the guy was so agitated that his trousers were parting company from his tee shirt. He clutched his trousers with the other frantic hand as his Customer Service Person talked on the phone to some other customer. She might have been able to ignore him, but I certainly couldn’t. One expects to lose one’s shirt at a bank, but pants are an altogether different matter.
