All I Wanted Was a Pepsi...

Auuugh! Institutions. Banks and governments in particular. When the two collide it answers the age-old philisophical question, "What happens when an irrestable force strikes and immovable object?" The answer, my friends, is that some poor sap gets screwed. Of couse that was me today. I won't bother going into gory details.

What the fuck is up with the casually-dressed, utterly ignorant, 20-something pieces of fluff you find behind the counter or at the other end of the phone with banks now? And the counter itself for that matter? What happened to well-trained and experienced tellers behind wickets? The fact that it has literally been years since I have had a teller answer any slightly out of the ordinary request with anything but, "I don't know, I'll check." At which point they go to their supervisor, who is also a vapid 20-something in casual clothes, who invariably stares at his or her monitor for a time (occassionally a few other brainless 20-somethings will join in) and eventually gives the teller a phone number to give to me so that I can call their helpline. And upon doing so the usual response from the helpline is to say, "You'll have to go into your branch."

I do not want to feel "comfortable" in my bank. I am not there to hang-out with the tellers. I'm there because I want an answer or I need some boondoggle that they have created resolved. You know what would make me "comfortable"? If I knew my money was being handled by competent individuals that actually knew what they were doing, that the back-end systems were secure and functional, that my branch actually retained my transaction records on site, that when I dial the phone number for my branch I actually get my branch and not a call-centre in Toronto, and when I walk in with a problem I will walk out with a resolution. Unfortunately I know from direct experience that the absolute opposite is the case.

Bottom line, and I am dead serious about this, I am buying a safe.