$131.50 Cash Deposit
Coins began to accumulate very quickly in my life many years ago. It was a two-pronged attack of coins: I stopped doing laundry myself, taking my soiled garments instead to a full-service laundromat where I paid cash cash money. And I started using MetroCards for the bus, instead of pouring fistfuls of coins into the bus fare machine twice or three times a day. On account of these two behavioral shifts I found that coins suddenly accumulated like a mold.
The $131.50 worth of coins from this day were all rolled and counted (twice) by me. Coins are heavy, and even $100 in coins can be a bit of an onerous burden to walk to the bank.
I entered the bank, conspicuously holding the heavy box in front of me. I don’t know if the banker guy standing at the door noticed the box, or if he thought the box contained weaponry and that this was an attempted terrorist attack, but whatever his immediate line of thinking I suspected that on account of the destruction of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center site on September 11, 2001, this banker was simply acting with an abundance of caution by asking me what business I intended to conduct at the bank this fine day.
I opened the box, revealing the couple of dozen rolls of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. I said that I had a bunch of coins to deposit. He waved his hand toward the bulletproof windows and said that one of the tellers would be happy to assist me in this matter.
I began to fill out a deposit slip when the banker said to wait, “No need for that, this banker will be happy to help you.”
It seemed dramatic to sit at a table with a banker for to deposit $131.50 worth of coins. This is the sort of table at which one might sit with a family and distant relatives for to close a mortgage or get a loan for a small business, yet here I was commanding all this attention for a deposit of $131.50 in coins.
Everyone seemed friendly enough, though, and on account of the destruction of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center site, I thought it would be prudent to make sure all involved had every confidence that I was on the up and up, that these coin rolls really contained coins and only coins, and so on.
I sat down with the banker at the big table and handed over the box of coins to the gentleman who had greeted me at the door. He told me he would take my box of $131.50 worth of coins to the back room where a team of tellers would sort, inspect, and have the money deposited straightaway.
Alas, for all this theater of what I thought was a slightly strange incident of customer service overkill, this all turned to be a sales trap. The banker at the big table told me to hand over my debit card and drivers license, and after bringing up my complete banking information on her computer screen and announcing some of my account balances into the cool airways of the bank she tried to get me to switch my credit card over to a new thing of theirs, a rewards program, a program which I told her had nothing on the rewards program I already use.
Now, let me also insert into this discussion that I have no high regard for bankers. I had no exposure to the loan crises or the housing collapse, but in the sometimes complicated processes of establishing and funding trusts and accounts regarding my father’s estate I was consistently baffled at how the bankers that I dealt with screwed up something at every single opportunity.
These bankers on this day were not those bankers from a few years ago, and even if they were I have no grudges to bear, just a healthy and justified vigilance to the fallibility of individuals in certain lines of work.
I refused (courteously, I think) to accept the un-needed credit card offer. I refused some other silly offers. The first banker who had greeted me at the door returned from the back room, waving the deposit slip at me saying “You only have $129 in here.” He handed me the deposit slip to initialize with the correction, but I said “Whaaaaaat? i counted those coins twice, it’s $131.50. $100 in quarters, $25 in dimes, $4 in nickels, and $2.50 in pennies.”
I was surprised at yet strangely proud of my poised self for remembering the exact amounts for each coin. $131.50, dare I say, is a welcome bonus considering its origin as ungainly loose change, but this was hardly a major financial transaction. The difference of $2.50 seemed insignificant (though I understood fully that banks are banks, and getting these things right is what they try to do) but I did not appreciate the sense of being accused of shorting the bank on this deposit.
The gentleman took the deposit slip back and returned to the fabled back room with the mysterious and industrious tellers. He returned a minute later saying “You were right. It’s $131.50. We didn’t count the pennies.”
By now, having batted away several consecutive offers for useless “enhancements” to my banking situation I was getting annoyed, this insignificant visit to the bank for to deposit of a bunch of coins snowballing into a series of confrontations which fortified my aforementioned skepticism of bankers.
I asked for the box back so I could get the hell outta here. I did not say those words out loud but I communicated these feelings in a bankerly fashion.
