My neighbor, Bill, dropped in the other day in a bit of a swivet. He’d been to the bank and had a sorry tale to tell.
“I almost got arrested,” he said, as I poured him a cup of coffee, “And I’m beginning to think that Willie Sutton had the right idea on how to treat banks.”
Rummaging around in my mental filing cabinet, I found Willie Sutton under “B” for bank robber. He was the man who said – when asked why he robbed banks – that he did it because “that’s where the money is.” Bill is about as law-abiding as my friends and neighbors get, so I didn’t think he was the bank robbing type.
“I simply wanted to cash a check,” Bill went on, “It was drawn on their bank, so I went up to the teller and signed the back of the check and told her I’d like it in large bills. She said, ‘That’ll be $7.50′ and that was the first hint that me and this bank weren’t going to be on each other’s Christmas card list.”
I had heard that the banking laws had changed, but I had no idea that they were now charging for checks drawn on their bank. I mean, what’s the point of going to their bank to cash it? Although, come to think of it, the charge to cash a check NOT drawn on the bank you’re trying to cash it at is probably even higher.
“The teller told me I could avoid the charge by opening a free checking account, but I don’t want another stinking checking account, so I told her that and then I told her that I was cashing the check and I wasn’t paying seven-fifty,” Bill went on, his eyes flashing sparks. It was clear that he was channeling Willie Sutton and possibly a couple of the James Gang here. If I was a teller I think my toe would be reaching for the panic button on the floor if I was confronted by Bill in this mood.
“So, did she cash it?” I asked.
“She said she had to check her list of approved accounts, and if the check’s issuer was on it, she’d waive the fee. So I told her to check the list and if the issuer was approved, give me my money. And if it wasn’t approved, give me my check back so I could take it to a bank that doesn’t gouge people.”
“She came back, smirking, and said it wasn’t on the list, but she could try putting it through anyway and I told her to do that. Que sorpresa! It turned out that it was approved, even though it wasn’t listed and she gave me my money and I left, but I was steaming, I’ll tell you.”
“So was it a local company?” I asked.
Bill gave me the look of a man whose biscuits were burnt right to charcoal.
“I’ll say it’s local! It’s the jeezly state of Maine or one of their agencies that I did some work for.”
Bill left and I pondered the subject of banks until my mind drifted back to an incident that led to my having the antique, $25,000 alarm clock mentioned in the title. It all started way back in the mists of time, about three years after Geekdaddy and I got hitched. We were childless. I was working for a well-known crystal jewelry firm, weighing and handing out precious metal, and the geek was repairing Volkswagens in our yard. Neither of us was making more than minimum wage, we were mortgaged up to the hilt and things were getting fraught, financially speaking. So much so that I insisted that the geek give up his beloved habit of buying a scratch ticket every time he went to the local convenience store, which he seemed to have to do at least once a day.
He promised he would, but he wasn’t too happy about it. One day, just before lunchtime, he showed up at the jewelry factory and asked them to buzz me out of the locked room I worked in. They weren’t happy about having employee’s spouses show up during working hours and I wasn’t happy to see him either, figuring that he was just stopping by to show me some stupid car part he picked up at a junkyard or something equally trivial. Instead, he handed me a paperback book and said, “Open it to where it’s bookmarked.”
I did and there was a scratch ticket where you could win $25,000 if you scratched off six 6′s and that’s just what he’d done. Well, I’m one of those slow reactors who register things just fine on the surface, but underneath, my mind is slowly turning over the ramifications, so I cussed him out for breaking his promise, told him to let me have the ticket and go home and we’d talk about it later. And we did. At length. I even forgave him for breaking his promise. (I was famous for being magnanimous even then.) Then we borrowed enough money for gas from my brother (we were flat broke at the time) and drove down to lottery headquarters, picked up the check and drove straight to a local bank to deposit it and get some money to make it through the weekend.
It was Fleet Bank and the folks were really cordial. They said we’d have to open an account to deposit the check into and offered us a choice of a toaster, a mixer or an alarm clock. We opted for the alarm clock, because we didn’t have one. We didn’t have a toaster or a mixer either, but we seemed to manage fine without them. Without an alarm clock, sometimes I barely made it to work on time. So we signed the paperwork, signed the check, opened the account and got a few temporary checks and I wrote one out for a hundred dollars and handed it to the manager, who had taken care of all this.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, “I can’t give you any money until the check clears, which will take 3 business days. Today being Friday, that’ll be next Wednesday or Thursday, depending. But you can have the clock now.”
“But the check is drawn on the state of Rhode Island,” I said, “You can’t trust the state to cover its checks?
The bank manager shrugged.
“Well, if we let them slide, next it’d be the local towns and then the local businesses and pretty soon, everyone would be kiting paper and we’d be looking at banks failing left and right. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
We left with the clock, shell-shocked but happy that we’d won enough money to pay off our mortgage and get us solvent. We looked at that clock a lot that weekend, as we ate macaroni and cheese and hot dogs and drained gas from junk VW’s to get me to work on Monday. It’s a really nice clock. It’s made by Sony and is called a Dream Machine. It plays “Ode to Joy” for the alarm and has a light, although the light button got knocked off at some point. It even has a radio, although we never use it. The plastic face got cracked when a cat jumped off the bed and kicked the clock with its back feet. But it still sits on my bedside table and every year, when I change the battery in it, I think of how we got our $25,000 clock, and of how it was a “wake-up” call for me on the state of the banking industry in this country. I’m even more alarmed about the whole banking biz now.