[First published in 2004]
I am truly p
d off. Bankers constantly test my patience and there seems to be nothing I can do about it. I think I have probably used nearly every bank available to me and still I have not found satisfaction. Why? Because they are all as bad as each other. One of them claims ‘there is another way’, this is true… I’ve personally always seen a certain beauty in the beneath the mattress style of banking. Despite absent security and interest, it certainly saves time, stress and energy. You know where your money is, what it’s doing and you can access it easily without having to put up with dancing cartoon Brummies.
One banker suggests they are ‘the world’s local bank’; well that’s frankly a load of bollocks. These credit-giving cretins are hardly capable of providing localised locality let alone worldwide service as such.
Fluent in Finance? off! Effluent in Finance more like. OK so I’m just spreading general abuse now without really justifying myself. My article has gone into default, I shall amend this.
My biggest gripe of all is to do with cashing cheques. I can send huge complicated documents across the globe in seconds; I can even send myself across the globe in days if I wish. Accessing my money however is a completely different matter. With all the fine technology available to us today, how can it still take an entire week to clear a cheque? Is this really how long it takes, are these the man hours required, or is something else more suspicious going on? During these five working days, are bankers dancing around with my money, laughing at me as they roll around in my dough? I can only imagine, as the money doesn’t disappear into the ether for a few days that they are doing something with it, earning their own interest no doubt. So relevant checks need to be made to my cheques, signatures and what not, but can’t I expect it to happen faster than this? I imagine that if I cashed fifty-two cheques in a year there might actually be a dedicated employee-working non-stop to bring me my money.
On the subject of staffing… another major annoyance; queues. Admittedly they’re a fact of life, but I work in a service industry and when we know we’re going to have a lot of customers we put more staff on, it’s simple. Supermarkets endeavour to open more tills to keep the queues to a minimum, and yet my local branch (and every branch) consistently has two cashiers serving a line that goes out the door. Meanwhile, shuffling past this extended queue, are members of staff taking their lunch breaks. In my job we can’t take breaks at our busiest times – how are these people different?
I can remember somewhere through the haze of my memory a time when banks were mostly open on Saturdays, being a time when most ‘working week’ people can actually do their banking, away from the busy lunchtime period. These days, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a restricted service at best.
If I go overdrawn by mistake, I am charged the princely sum of thirty plus pounds, comparable to a day of my own hard labour. Understandably this is a penalty fare, but a days work?! Yes it certainly will teach me a lesson. The lesson that I should probably keep my money elsewhere, especially considering that the reason I went overdrawn was because of last month’s charges. A nice money making spiral for the bankers as I desperately budget my life to fix it.
In comparison to this, the last time they made a mistake with my finance, I tried to ask for thirty pounds in return. A fair deal I would say, it was a thorough inconvenience to me; wasting a good deal of what should have been a ‘working day’ sorting out their mistake. No was the predictable answer, accompanied by mocking laughter, as though I’d made a joke. Deadly serious was my reply, surely this arrangement of fee charging should go both ways, they are after all constantly making money from mine. They treated me as though I was being deliberately silly!
I am rarely deliberately silly.
The biggest problem with the bankers, I find, is that no one is really accountable any more. We’re not talking to human beings anymore; certainly not the one’s responsible for our pain. No we’re talking to the poor sods employed to work as go-betweens for the computer. It’s the computer that says no you can’t have the money; I’ve swallowed your card for no apparent reason, or we’re taking thirty plus of your hard earned pounds. It’s impossible to actually state your annoyance without harbouring guilt for taking it out on an innocent. I have to feel sorry for the ‘arrow-fodder’ personnel they call Cashiers or Personal Bankers, they are after-all basically the little people like the rest of us. The fat-cats are well hidden, and rich on our cash.
The biggest problem is that they know they are an absolute necessity for us; we have no choice but to use them. Everybody needs to eat, and yet the people who sell us food are crawling over each other to get our business by providing better service and value. The bankers however are getting increasingly complacent and bullish.
I’m in virtual print, so I’ll attempt to incite a revolt. Spend your bank charges on better home security; stick it all under your mattress. Invest your money yourself to ensure it’s going where you agree with, if you wish to make more over time. That’s what I would do if I wasn’t bound by these bankers from their own doing.
In the meantime I shall continue to plot my revenge for when I have more money, then they will want me to love them. A wise man once said ‘lack of money is the root of all evil’. When that millionaire pipe-dream comes along, I will be the one calling the shots, and those bankers will be crawling at my feet to look after my cash and give me proper service. A service quality I will demand upon the threat of serious action.
The Drunk in the Trunk
