When I got home this afternoon, I went to the bank to deposit some money.
My bank – The Halifax – has a FastTrak machine, where you just put your card in, then it takes your money and cheques, counts them, and makes the deposit. It isn’t quite as fast as the name suggests (you have to confirm the amount for each cheque), and it IS temperamental concerning damaged notes and cheques, but it does the job. It’s main benefit is that most people stay away from it, so when there is a queue of 20 people waiting for the one cashier on duty, I can just stroll in, do the business, and stroll out.
Incidentally, I need to have a word with some of my pupils and make sure they stop tearing big chunks off their cheques when they tear them out of the book, and to try and use handwriting that isn’t quite so… copperplate in appearance. The machine doesn’t like that!
It was a torn cheque that forced me to go and stand in the queue to deposit it person-to-person. There were TWO (shock!) cashiers on duty, and one person in the queue, who’d just walked in (dammit). Cashier No. 1 became available, then cashier No. 2 immediately after. The guy in front walked to No. 1, who now declared he was no longer available, so I had to step back for him to go to No. 2.
And guess what?
Well, no matter how hard I try, I cannot understand why I, personally, would ever want to go into a bank and instigate business with one of the cashiers unless it involved either putting money IN or taking money OUT of my account. I just can’t.
But it seems that everyone else on the planet engages in anything BUT depositing or withdrawing money. This explains why there is always a mile-long queue (especially at the Halifax). This guy was no exception, and whatever he was doing it took a bloody long time – longer even than the length of time it takes a human cashier to credit a single cheque to your account in the Halifax (and that’s LONG): another cashier saw the queue building up again and came on duty, and the guy was still at whatever it was when I went out!