Bank Shot

Let's see if I got this straight.

When we decided to use a fairly dormant bank account recently, it turned out that Sara was not on the account. We decided to get her on the account. If you heard this one before, stop me.

She worked by a branch of the Famous Bank, and I worked by a branch, fairly far away. We cooked up a plan to save time and trouble.

She went into her branch with a paycheck and said she wanted to deposit it and get on the account. They took the check, and had her do some mysterious bank things. "Now Jeff just needs to go into his branch and sign an authorization, and you are all set" the charming woman told her.

I go to my branch. The manager is at the Personal Banking counter, and eager to help. I explain what the Other Branch Banker told Sara. He has no idea what I am talking about. He stares at me, thinking so hard that I can almost hear it happen.

"So do you have the form?" I ask, interrupting his furious cognitive gymnastics.

He looks startled to see me talk.

"There is no form like that" he asserts and transfers the intensity of his attention to the computer screen. After watching him click and drag and peck and point and click a few minutes, I interrupt again.

"Isn't there a form for adding your wife to your account?" I ask, innocent in perpetuity of Bank Process.

"That's not what Brie was doing here. She put some kind of code in, and I need to find out what it means." he said, pointing the to the screen as though I could see his dilemma.

"Doesn't someone here know the codes?" I ask, even more innocently, if that were possible.

"I'm the manager, I know the codes." he said, standing up straight and reassuringly after several minutes of confidence-draining keyboard meandering. "Let me put a call in to Brie."

Having been in government for almost a quarter of a century, all my alarms went off at the sound of "let me put a call in" but I kept my peace, smiling vaguely and unthreateningly, catching the Los Angeles car chase on the wall mounted television tuned to CNN.

Why was there a wall mounted tv tuned to CNN in the personal banking area, I wondered.

Before the thought could turn into an outloud provocation of the Manager, I squashed it. He was Putting A Call in, and I didn't want the odds stacked any more precariously against Brie answering in person by an idle question.

I watched him punch in a series of numbers and codes while still thinking faster than the speed of light in a dark pail. Finally he announced his name, purpose of his call, time of his call, number where he could be reached just as instructed by the voice mail coach who answered.

He leaned forward on the counter and started drumming his fingers, staring over my shoulder. But not at the tv, where the car chase continued.

Why wasn't the manager riveted on the car chase like all the other people in the Personal Banking area?

"Brie isn't in?" I inflected upwardly, indicating uncertainty despite the declarative form of the sentence.

"She will return my call" the manager smiled, drumming his fingers in a complex 7/5 time.

"Is there some way to fill out a form and have my wife added to my account without waiting for Brie to return the call?" I asked as innocent as the birth of baby Jesus, by any account.

"Oh, certainly, " the manager responded spilling a giant bag of reassurance at my feet, friendly as the owner of the winner of the Kentucky Derby.

I waited a few minutes, slightly distracted by the fact that the driver of the chased car had leapt into the freeway and was being chased by his hostage, a woman carrying a baby. There was something very wrong with the picture but I couldn't put my problem solving energy in its account.

"Could we just do that?"

"Oh, no, I need to find out what this code is" he smiled, rowing the boatload of his agreement across the canal of doubt that had opened between us.

"Could you call anyone in this branch for an explanation?" I asked, as innocent as baby Stalin at the age of conception.

His eyes clouded over, and I began to fear he was reminded of a Seinfeld episode where Jerry tries to rent a car in the single most sarcastic car rental exchange in sitcom history. Then they cleared and he again punched numbers and codes into the phone. A human answered, and the Manager rattled off the situation and a request to explain the code if the respondant would get to the appropriate computer screen. "Um hum." "Ah." "Ah hah." "MMmmmm" he punctuated the litany of the respondant with his ululative and fricative sounds of assent.

"It was the code for the business account of the company she works for." The manager said after putting the phone back.

A minute passed. "And...?"

"I guess there is no online form." He tendered, shoulders hunched and palms outward in the pose of a man eager to share his confoundment with his new found friend.

"So...?"

"Brie will call back, and she can fax us some forms." The manager had put the keystone in an arch of burnished Bank marble, an unshakeable edifice of process, order, and security.

"Isn't there a form here I can sign, give to my wife to sign, and then give to Brie?" I ask, innocent as the first hydrogen atom in the universe one femtosecond after the big bang.

His eyes widened at the simplicity of the notion. "Sure! We can do that!"

He went back to the computer. For a long time. Finally he said "What is the spelling on your name, Jeff?"
And for minutes we went like that, incising with a photon chisel the adamantine facts of my wife's and my names and middle initials in the obdurate phosphor surface of the computer screen.

In the meantime, there was a huge gasp as the woman running with the baby caught up with the gun waving driver in the middle of the freeway. Black and white squad cars executed flawless emergency brake assisted j-spin maneuvers to encircle the absurd couple, and one brushed by the perp, discharging a patrol officer who took the whole shebang of improbable bodies down in one bruising tackle. The mother, her baby intact, struggled to her feet and ran off, while dozens of other officers converged on the body of the hijacker.

"Okay," the manager said. "Just need to print this."

The printer worked. That was like the dog that didn't bark in the Sherlock Holmes story. The whole point was the dog didn't bark. The whole point was the printer worked. Several employees wandered over to watch the forms emerge uneventfully. One pulled out the top sheet and passed it around to the others for their inspection.

"Printer's working." The manager nodded, champion of our intimate rondezvous with chance. Finally he collated the two pages of paper and stapled them. Then he set them in front of himself, while the other employees wandered off absently, a commercial for rage-suppressing serotonin-uptake inhibitors furling across the screen in pastel yellows.

He read every word on the form, coming at last to the two lines at the bottom of the second page. There were "x"s at the head of each line. He carefully drew "X"s in ink over the printed "x"s and slowly pivoted the page toward me.

"You sign here, Jeff." He looked up and met my glazed gaze. "Jeff, wasn't it?" He waited for me to sign, moving his head involuntarily as I added the last flourish to the date.

He took the form back, and carefully circled the "X" he had drawn over the "x" on the second line.

"Sara signs here." He said, pivoting it back to me like a Baron indicating to the king exactly where he was supposed to sign the Magna Carta.

At this point, I notice a woman employee on a stool two slots down the counter. She had been watching us for a while. She catches my eye and smiles. "May I see that?" she asks the manager as polite as a Dallas cotillion caterer catching a bus boy in the act of filching a shrimp.

He hands it over to her carefully, as though the laser printed letters were actually lead shot balanced on a teflon blade, likely to spill as not.

She read through it quickly, clicked a few keys on her keyboard, and pointed to the electronic signature device. "Would you please sign there, Mr. B?" she indicated solicitously.

I did. "All done." She stated, as though we were kids at a drinking fountain who had played enough in the water for the day.

The manager glanced over her shoulder, then beamed broadly at me. "IS there anything else we can do to help you, Jeff?" he asked, placing his palms together in the gesture of prayerful supplication. "We are here to help you if there is anything we can do for you let us know."