His cheeks reddened as he read his latest bank statement.
He’d write them an email. He would make it formal, like a letter. He began to write.
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Dear Sir,
I am writing to thank you for your due diligence in recently bouncing my relatively small cheque with which I endeavored to pay my paper bill last month. Of course, I am no expert, but by my calculations, three ‘nanoseconds’ must have elapsed between his presenting the cheque and the arrival into my account of the funds needed to honour it. I refer here, of course, to the automatic and monthly deposit of my modest pension, an arrangement which, I might point out, has been in place with your bank for a number of years. You are to be commended for seizing that extremely brief window of opportunity, and also for quickly debiting my account by way of a penalty for the inconvenience this must have caused to your bank. My commendation and thankfulness spring directly from the manner in which this incident has gratifyingly caused me to take time to fully rethink my general attitude when organizing my personal finances.
Firstly, I have noticed that whereas I personally attend to your telephone calls and letters, when I try to contact you, I am confronted by the impersonal, re-recorded and faceless entity, which is presented to me as my bank. Owing to my recent rethinking, following on from the transaction I have described above, from now on, like yourselves, I choose only to deal with a flesh-and-blood real live person. My mortgage and loan payments will therefore and hereafter, no longer be automatic, but will arrive at your bank by cheque, addressed personally and confidentially to an employee at your bank, who I advise you to nominate.
Please find attached the form, titled Application for the Submission of a Nominated Contact for your chosen employee to complete. I would indicate the necessity of it running to several pages is brought about by my needing to know as much about the nominated contact as your bank knows about me. In order to bring this situation about you will note that all copies of the contact’s medical history, bank statements, income, assets, liabilities and debts must be countersigned by the bank, along with all supporting documentation.
In due course, I will issue your employee with a PIN number that must be entered before all future dealings can take place. This being modeled on the number of key strokes needed to access my account made it necessary that it be no shorter than thirty-two digits.
I have installed a simple menu system for those occasions you wish to contact me, shown as follows.
- To make an appointment with me.
- To query an item.
- To leave a message.
- To return to the main menu, to hear options 1 through to 3.
Although his arrangement may, on some occasions, initiate a lengthy wait, I have selected a number of calming melodies that will play throughout this time.
I assure you that it is genuinely regrettable, but again, following your own business model, necessary for me to charge an establishment fee to cover the cost of preparing this new arrangement for all future bank transactions…
–
He was about to write something like ‘Your humble client’, but sat thinking for a moment; another rethink. It was a David and Goliath situation. It really wasn’t his thing.
“Money grabbers!” he whispered and clicked on ‘Delete’.