You Can Bank on This

I saw a cartoon where some guy was trying to reach bank customer service on his phone and the recording said, “Please listen carefully as some of our options have changed. To speak to a representative. press or scream &#$%#*$%# over and over into your phone for 30 minutes.”(Use your imagination to fill in the word. If I write what the cartoon actually said, chances are my blog post would be banned from my Lightly Tethered page on Facebook.) Even my husband, who normally has the patience of Job, occasionally hollers into the phone when he’s caught in voice jail. And once in that situation I saw him repeatedly pound a banana against the phone receiver, which did no good but it made me laugh, which was probably his aim in the first place. He knows I’m a sucker for silly stuff. When we lived on the other side of the state, we initially did our banking with a local credit union. Then a banker, a man I knew well and who liked to tease me because I feel so strongly about the benefits of taxes, asked me why I was supporting a credit union, which pays no taxes at all. That was news to me but his argument was so effective that I left the credit union and moved our money to a small, independent local bank. It had several branches but was small enough that the people remembered me from time to time when I went inside. Most banking is done online now and we stayed with the small bank when we moved. I rarely have to write a check these days but when I do, people get a kick out of seeing “Wheatland Bank” on my account. I was dismayed when two years ago, Wheatland was bought by Glacier, a still small but slightly larger institution. I kept my fingers crossed. The other day I was having trouble adding someone for a Zelle payment and I picked up the phone to call the bank. After two rings an actual person picked up and answered, “Wheatland Bank, how may I help you?” Whew. So far, so good.

Photo courtesy Dinero777 at Pixabay.com