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Chiswick, United Kingdom
51° 29' N 0° 16' W
Feb 03, 2005 14:35
Distance 0km

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Fight the System

Text written in: English

I need to share with whoever reads my travel diary about the utter disdain I have for England. Actually it's not for England itself. England is a wonderful place full of big buildings, high towers and history, lots of history. What most of you probably don't realize that besides having a lot of history, England also has a lot of banks, and here underlies the problem.

Today I had my views re-enforced. Banks in England say on their doors that they open at 9:30am. Some, such as The Abbey open at 10am. Well neither of these times are correct. When you read them you should treat them as more of a 'guide' for when the Bank will be 'actually open' for business.

This morning I had the pleasure to go to two banks. The first was NatWest. Now, to be fair NatWest has been quite good to me. Their staff are quite pleasant and it is 'generally' a good experience. Today this was not the case. I was greeted by an overly happy but at the same time suspicious woman standing at the entrance to the branch with a spanky headset on. She asked me to state my business. I informed her in the loudest voice that I could muster that "I am here to pick up an ATM card that the bank thru a massive and concerted amount of incompetence was seemingly unable to deliver to a residential address some four blocks from this branch" following up with that I had to take the morning off work to come and pick it up. She immediately snapped "do you have any ID"?

I assured her I did.

"You can stand in either of these queues". This is a little offputting. It seems to indicate that two queues might in-fact be faster than one… or so I thought..

The thing about going to the bank 'first thing' is that everyone else has the same idea. It'll be quite quiet in the morning and I will fly thru the queue. The bank I expect has someone in HR that has a grudge against her line manager.

Perhaps they had an affair that ended unhappily, whatever the case she has sat down in her office one day and decided to take it out on her line manager by making him look bad. And when I mean bad, I mean incompetent. I expect she wrote a memo that goes something like this:

"To all branch managers. To keep our remaining branches open and to not force the closure of any further 200 year old branches we are going to reduce the number of tellers with customer facing roles before 3:30pm by 80%. This will keep a maximum number of branches open in this continuing tough economic climate so we can continue to give the current level of satisfaction to our loyal customers".

With a glint in her eye and the loud (and true) though "that'll fuck him" running through her mind she will have hit send on the e-mail. Our fate sealed due to dodgy love.

ONE person sitting at the teller positions out of a possible seven. Nice one NatWest. Queue of 18 people by 9:45am. A coupla more staff dribbled in around 10 to 10.. 9:30am indeed!

Anyway, I got my card and then headed off down to Halifax a few blocks down the road. I had a sparkling new cheque to deposit into my new USD account. Exciting times indeed. Or so I thought.

No only did I go into the branch that I opened the account in, but I also took the deposit book sent to me by the bank. I even had ID, the cheque to deposit, a pen to use to sign for it if needed and a second form of ID if the cheque was too large to deposit all at once.

You can imagine my surprise when I was told by the 18 year old bank teller that they were 'infact' unable to accept deposits for that account at their branch.

This was a little off-putting at first.

I decided to take the approach, aren't all trading banks in the UK able to accept deposits from any other bank? The blank look that he afforded me made me change pace: "ok, I don't blame you, I blame the man and it's the system we have to fight", still the blank look. I took my stuff and left.

Argh.