Grey's Journal:
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Please enter your card: The ATM made a satisfying wrrrrr-click! sound as I fed it my bank card. What action would you like to perform? Withdraw cash. Enter Amount: £100 Enter PIN: Hmmm... my PIN...? It seemed that in the past two months of not using it, my PIN had quietly slipped from my mind. This was distressing as I had never forgotten an important password over such a short span of time before. I feared it was the first of many small steps over the next thirty years that would lead me down the road to the level of technological incompetence of my parents. I squinted my eyes and put pressure on my brain to recall the four digits, but all it knew was they sounded like an important date. I started guessing. 1812? Incorrect PIN 1776? Incorrect PIN Urban legend held that if you entered three consecutive incorrect PINs, instead of a happy wrrrr-click! and a returned card, you would get an angry wrrrr-CRUNCH! as the ATM ate your card like the recycling machines eat tin cans. I decided this probably wasn't true but acted as though it was, canceling my transaction and ejecting the card. Over the next few days, I returned to the ATM sporadically to try and guess my pin (1984? 1894?) with no luck. While being unemployed I did have the time to brute force my way from 0000 to 9999, I figured this course of action would set off a red flag deep in some secret bank database. The ATM would refuse to return my card and ten years from now when I applied for my first home-ownership loan, I would be turned down for reasons the bank wouldn't specify. I reasoned that it would actually take less time to guess my PIN than it would to call HSBC and prove my identity to them with a delightful game of 20,000 questions, so I decided instead to cash one of the checks I received from my physics tutoring. I went into an HSBC and stood in line. There was only one teller open and she was busy serving an important-looking woman. I watched with awe as the teller counted out £20 notes, placed them onto a pile until it's own height destabilized it, then slapped a rubber band around the notes and started construction of another stack. There were enough of these brick-sized bundles of money to lay the foundation of a house. Finally, after the bank realized that even the most pure-hearted of the customers in line found their minds calculating the cost/benefit ratio of mugging this woman when she left, the bank finally put a second teller on duty. The man ahead of me, in contrast, traded two fifty pence coins for a pound and continued on his way. I stepped up to the teller. ``May I help you?'' ``I'd like to cash this cheque.'' I casually slid him the cheque and, because I wasn't sure precisely how this worked in England, I included my bank card as well. The man paused at the sight of the bank card -- clearly thrown off the usual script for this procedure -- before telling me, ``You can't cash that cheque.'' ``Why not?'' ``Because...'' and he went on an explanation of banking policy I didn't understand but seemed to hinge on `that cheque came from a different bank.' ``You have to deposit it and then write a cheque to yourself to withdraw the amount.'' ``I see...'' I said, not quite understanding how this wasn't cashing a cheque, but nonetheless, I went off to fill out a deposit slip and write a cheque to myself. I had never actually looked at the cheques the bank issued to me almost eight months ago when I first arrived in London and opened my checking account. I had just slipped a few in my wallet and assumed they were the same as American cheques. Needless to say, they weren't. When I took one out of my wallet, it didn't have the usual `Pay to the order of', `Amount', and `Signature' lines I was used to. Instead, I was presented with a strange 3-by-4 box like so:
What were all those boxes for? Why did one say `pay'? Was I allowed to write past the middle? I crowded 'Pay Wellington Grey' on the first line and '100 and 00/100 pounds' on the second and hoped nothing important went in the nine other boxes. The deposit slip, which I hoped would be more direct, wasn't. There seemed to be ten questions, none of which I knew the answers to. There were vague questions like `Address' and `Code'. Did they want my address or the bank's? How was I supposed to fit either on a two centimeter line? Which code did they want? Was it a secret code? In addition, there were several boxes that indicated that I was to fill them with numbers. At least here I was hopeful that I could guess the correct answer by comparing the number of digits they wanted with the numbers on my bank card. But none of the numbers on my bank card were the correct length. I'm always a bit flustered by forms of any kind so I did what I usually do under pressure: I answer the questions as quickly as possible without thinking about how dubious it is that this is the information they are looking for. I crammed numbers approximately the length the slip asked for into their spaces and walked over to the strange boxy machine that accepted deposit envelopes. It looked like a cross between a dalek and a safe. I guessed it's original purpose was for bomb squads to place undefusable weapons inside to contain the blast. After mistakenly trying to put my bank card in the receipt printer (several times) I eventually got the black monstrosity to open a huge, cavernous jaw on the top. The on-screen instructions told me to drop my slip inside. I leaned over the black hole and peered down. I had the same feeling I get when looking over the side of a bridge or over a boat into the water. I feel like my glasses are trying to leap off my face and into the abyss below. I leaned back, threw the envelope in, and closed the hatch. The last thing I wanted was to explain that I had lost my glasses in the deposit machine. I went back to the counter and handed the teller the cheque I wrote. He smiled to himself and I knew I was in trouble. I expected him to lean over to the other tellers and show them my cheque for everyone's amusement. ``You,'' he said in a slow, measured tone, as though to prevent himself from laughing, ``You, don't write your name after `pay' you write the amount.'' ``Oh.'' ``And what is that?'' He pointed to my '00/100'. ``That's how many pence.'' He blinked at me, so I clarified: ``Zero pence.'' I smiled my big I-may-have-no-idea-what-I'm-doing-but-at-least-I'm-friendly smile. The teller was unimpressed and looked at me as though he had no idea what I was talking about or why I'm was smiling so much. ``Write `only' after the amount of pounds you want. Why don't you void the cheque and try again.'' I did. And when I returned with my second cheque, I felt like a student making a second go at a math problem on a test after the teacher announced a hint to the class: unsure why my original idea still wasn't right. Fortunately, this time my cheque was close enough to correct and I got my money. I left the bank (the first teller was still counting out money for the important-looking woman) feeling humbled and it hit me how little I know of basics of life in England. Last week when I sent out my fliers for physics tutoring, I didn't know how to properly address a letter in the UK. I had to go to the post office website and find out. (Each piece of information on a separate line, with the return address on the back of the envelope) More distressingly, I realized that if I was mugged and stabbed in a back alley, I had no idea what emergency number to call on my cell phone. Would 9-1-1 bring an ambulance to me as it would in America? Probably not. I tried to find out online but it was no good. For that matter, what happens if I'm sick and need a doctor? I remember hearing socialist fairy-tales during my college years of universal health care in Europe, but I have no idea how to access it or even if I had a right to. What about my legal rights? Once again, no idea. Is there something like the Bill of Rights I can depend on? Am I even covered by it since I'm not an English citizen, but an Irish one? Or, could the police, if they felt like, beat me with billy clubs in a back alley and leave me trying to brute force the correct number to call for help? I imagined myself starting with 0 and working my way up until either the battery died or I did. How does the government work? I know the words `Parliamentary Monarchy', but by no means do I understand what they represent. In a lot of ways, I feel I know no more about London and living now than I did eight months ago. It was more than a bit discouraging to know that the average ten-year-old in London probably knows more about how to live in the city than I do. |
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Copyright © 2004 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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