{chortle!} Here’s my favorite conspiracy theory:
All of the morons of the world have a radar chip implanted in their brains. This chip is tuned into my car. Every time I get in the car and turn on the engine, a signal goes out to all the morons at once. It impels every one of them to drop what they’re doing, leap into their cars, and hurry out to get in front of me.
You think I jest?
No. It is objective truth: if there is a moron, it gets in front of me. Every moron in the world gets in front of me the minute my car rolls onto the road.
So. Late in the morning, I get around to transferring nine grand from the S-corp’s checking account to my personal checking account, pursuant to the scheme to pay off the onerous car loan.
Having driven over there just yesterday, I happen to know that Thunderbird Road, the main route to the credit union on the GDU West campus, is a frenetic, gawdawful mess, all dug up with road construction.
So I decide to range westerly on a main drag that runs several miles south of there. This is good. I’m driving along smoothly, nothing too wacky happens, and in fact it occurs to me to wonder…where on earth are all the morons?
Welp. I’ll tellya where the morons were: inside the credit union. That’s where.
When I prance in, there’s one (count her: 1) woman at the teller’s counter in front of me. There are only two people staffing the teller’s counter, but one of ’em isn’t doing anything that resembles customer service. Another teller is exiting through the employee door but, seeing me come in and recognizing me (we all know each other by now), she chirps, “We’ll be right with you.”
Oh, forlorn hope!
The woman in front of me, it develops, is trying to withdraw a large amount of money — let us say, many of thousands of dollars — in cash.
This transaction is so irregular that it gives our sweet young teller kittens. She’s moving forward with it, but it is clearly very hard to accomplish. She wrestles and she fences and she doughtily does battle. But it takes a long time. Finally she’s ready to fork over the stacks of cash.
The woman says, “I want to count it.”
At this point I and the three men who have stacked up behind me stifle our moans, but alas, we are audible. One of the guys — you have to hand this to him — is an artist at the Dramatic Sigh. One of his DS’s elicits another promise that “we’ll be right with you!”
By now, this is beginning to strike me as freaking hilarious: I should’ve known! 😀
The hapless teller gives the woman the “you-are-gonna-make-me-faint-dead-away” look. The manager, who by now has come in, seen what was up, and started to lurk, says “we’ll have to machine-count it.”
“OK,” says the moron. “Let me see.”
So they demonstrate the machine to her but inform her that nooo, she is not coming behind the counter.
As this part of the transaction proceeds, the manager says to the moron, agreeably enough, “You’ll be using this to buy a car?”
The moron gives her a blank look.
The manager explains that when someone withdraws such a large amount of cash from a credit-union account, they need to know what it will be used for.
The moron replies with something unintelligible, but clearly it’s a lot more polite than the response this would have elicited from moi, the Wicked Bitch of the West. I think she says something like “why do you ask?,” not “it’s none of your effing business.” Apparently she refrains from saying, “I’m investing in $70,000 worth of meth.”
Now the manager, put on the defensive, tries to explain that the nosy question is posed only out of concern for the customers’ well-being, given the plurality of scams out there. Note how neatly she refrains from saying “we may have to report this batsh!t transaction to the IRS”…
In fact, there’s a limit to how much you’re allowed to pay in cash for a single transaction. I forget what it is, but I learned this from ex-DH, who had a client who was trying to sell a large and fancy boat. Some guy came into the client’s store (he owned a small retail business) and offered to buy said schooner for ten grand, cash dollah.
No. Bad sheeple!
They beat around the bush a little, the woman offers a weak excuse, and the transaction continues.
Finally the young teller and her boss shovel the moron out the door.
A Dramatic Sigh of relief is heard from the line of customers.
I’m next, and I do nothing to make our excellent young woman’s life any better. I fork over the $9,000 check I’ve written on the corporate checking account and explain that the effing system will not let me deposit it to my personal account. What I expect is she will simply deposit it to checking.
She, however, being a creature with common sense but still being too young to understand that common sense no longer applies in our world, says sensibly, “I can just make this transfer.”
“That would be perfect,” I say, succumbing to the same illusion.
So now the poor kid tries to accomplish this. She struggles and she wrestles and she keyboards and she taps. Eventually the manager AND the non-customer-servicing teller emerge to try to help her. They all struggle.
More Dramatic Sighs waft heavenward from the customer line.
After some determined persistence, they succeed. God bless ’em! I am thrilled and very, very glad I did not persist in trying to make the transfer electronically, $4,000 on one day and then $5,000 on the next. (Just imagine the potential for fuck-up!) I fly out of the office, not waiting to eavesdrop on the next transaction but hoping that all Mr. Dramatic Sigh wanted was to extract enough cash to buy a Big Mac for lunch.
And thinking… “Thank you, God, for not making me work in customer service!”
Image: DepositPhotos
