I had occasion to need certified funds last week, which set me into a tizzy. The last time I needed such an instrument, 2011, with my credit union five hundred miles away from me, I had to get a cash advance on a credit card, which carries extortionate fees, and then withdraw my daily limit from local ATMS over a period of five and pay slightly less criminal fees to get five money orders from the USPS.
We’ve progressed a bit in the past few years, though. Turns out my credit union now has “shared branches” with other suchlike across the country, and I could go to one a few blocks from my office and get a cashier’s check. At least that’s what Claudia at Kinecta Federal Credit Union’s customer service line told me on Wednesday. Problem solved, I thought.
Well, come Friday, I walked over to the DVA Federal Credit Union office in Chinatown and entered quite a blast from another planet.
The branch was a quasi-subterranean bare-bones affair with nothing but a roped-in queue to three tellers behind four-inch bullet-proof Plexiglas windows between them and customers. (My credit union in Sunnyvale was a carpeted expanse with a receptionist and nothing but completely open counters for the tellers.) Immediately I was struck by the pervasive stench of stale cigarettes and alcohol.
I waited in the queue, filled out the “shared branch” paperwork, waited again and then ran up against a snag: evidently my credit union imposes a limit on the amount that a member can withdraw via a shared branch. (Don’t know why, or who sets the arbitrary limit; perhaps they’re worried that you could be in the hands of kidnappers and this is so they’ll know you can’t raise the full ransom they’re demanding, so they’ll let you go. Or kill you.) So I had to call their customer “service” line again, and waited 28 minutes until one of the apparently three representatives they have working at any given time picked up.
(The details of this are for a different post, but let me just state the blindingly obvious: any customer “service” line that makes you wait more than five minutes to have a humanoid answer your call is telling you in unequivocal terms that their time is vastly more important than yours. And you’ll notice that they always manage to staff their sales line more fully than their customer support line.)
So, eventually Penita got the ransom-foiling limit raised, and I got back in line again.
And that’s when I realized that someone was having a much worse day than I was.
I’d had time to notice that almost every customer in the credit union was taking out cash—maybe depositing a paycheck, maybe just making a withdrawal. I didn’t get the details (because it was taking place behind that Plexiglas wall). But they clearly were living in a cash economy.
This one fellow was apparently trying to deposit/cash his paycheck, but he didn’t have either his account number or a photo ID and the teller couldn’t take it. The man would have to go wherever these documents were kept and return, but of course he couldn’t do that before the office closed at 1600. And he needed the cash because he had bills to pay. The teller was adamant, however, and eventually the guy left.
Now, I’d got myself entirely wound up about the transaction that I needed to complete, but if I hadn’t been able to do it, I would still have had options. Not pleasant ones, but viable nonetheless. This guy—not so much.
When I finally got back up to the Plexiglas wall, the teller crept her way through the issuing of my check. It was hard to hear each point of the transaction, even through the gouged-out “communication” portal. But when I finally realized that she was asking if there was anything else she could do for me, this slipped out before I could stop it: “No. Not unless you’re serving drinks.”
That amused some of the queuers, but not the teller. I collected my check and bolted, back to a great job that deposits my pay electronically into my accounts in an institution that has electronic bill payment capabilities.
This is something I don’t typically think about unless there’s some kind of glitch in any of the processes. But when you do think of it, it’s a wonder of modern technology, and as it happens I’m truly grateful for it.
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