Witch Bank and Cardboard Smiles

It recently came to my attention - when I say recently I mean about two years ago - that I have be holding three cheques that need to be deposited into my bank account. Several of these cheques date back to antiquated times, when I had bleached blonde hair, but let's not dwell on the great depression era.  Why do we Australians write ‘cheque’ with a fancy French spelling anyway? I mean, what the heque? It's a bit of a pain in the neque.

Only one of these bank-approved pieces of paper in my possession was worth much - a tax refund - and who knows why it came to me via my real, non-virtual, spider-infested letter box. Perhaps my pen slipped and I accidently ticked the glacial mail rather than the lightning bolt electronic mail when I was taxing myself.

So last Saturday morning, evidently in the absence of anything more practical or sensible to do, I went into my bank to cash these random cheques. Has anyone been into a 21st century bank? They are totally spooky. A young woman in a fancypants bank suit meets you at the door and smiles at you and enquires of your general wellbeing and then asks "and how may I help you today?"

I know, right? Totally freaked me out, mainly because I thought she was one of those generic, photogenic smiling cardboard cutouts that banks, insurance companies and government departments use as a doorstop to lure you into their establishment. But she was real.

I mean, who does that? Smile in a bank? What sort of bank ponzi scheme is this? After my shock discovery that the smiley cardboard cutout was in fact a real human with real human teeth, I decided that she had to be a virtual humanbot; a mirage created by politeness, smiles and rainbows, that's beamed off the walls, right into the path of your face.

If it wasn't completely inappropriate I would have tried to poke her head to see if she was issued by an overhead projector.  Maybe then I would get to see the virtual bank manager and then the real-life police officer with real-life handcuff accessories.

Or perhaps this bank welcomer / helper is a white witch, whose motus operandi is to take money from the rich and then deposit it into the same person’s bank account.  The most pointless witch strategy ever, but that's white witches for you.

You see, this is nothing like the bank service that I used to know.  Banks used to be a great place to enjoy waiting in queues for hours and hours, sometimes weeks, and that's before you even got to the cash cow counter, where you were generally addressed by a uninterested, grumpy bank teller without a real or fake cardboard cutout smile.  My bank trip the other day took about 8.3 seconds.

I imagine the reason the service in banks is so tremendous these days is because they have no customers; only cyberbot clients who login remotely. Praise the lord for the interweb.