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Tuesday, August 22, 2006

The Tuesday Twat(s)

No. 73. Illiterate Bank Clerks and Innumerate Posties

OK, this has been sitting on my "To Do" list for some time now, but this week has elbowed aside the planned Tuesday Twat.

Of all the jobs in the world, there are some that one assumes require at least the basic ability to differentiate between the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet and the 10 westernised Arabic numerals. Two examples that spring immediately to mind are Sign Writers (although the ability to spell is not apparently top of the list of requirements) and those performance artists that take all their clothes off and contort their bodies in such away that they can spell out the word "SALE", without achieving penetration.

Others would probably include Bank workers and Postal Delivery Operatives.

My Postie has trouble with both. I live in a large apartment building, separated into several blocks A-M with about 60 individual apartments in each block. I live in 60J. Why then do I regularly get mail for 27J or 32J? Why do I sometimes get mail for 45B (yesterday morning) or 25C? More importantly, given that several of these apartments are empty for the summer, how often does my mail go to another apartment? And could this explain the letter I received last week dated 11th of January? (It wasn't important thank god, hence me not realising it was missing).

Bank Workers seem to be little better. As you can imagine, I am up to my neck in paperwork preparing for my upcoming move to Canada. Top of the list is my application for a work permit. This requires the sending of a half dozen different forms and photocopied certificates etc etc to the Canadian High Commission. Most important it seems is the C$150 in fees. For reasons that escape me and probably have something to do with the war of 1812 (see, I've been reading up on my history!), unless I travel all the way to Grosvenor St in London clutching a fistfull of Canadian Loonies and Twoonies (that's a 1 dollar and 2 dollar coin respectively), I need a banker's draft.

What's one of those I hear you ask? Don't feel too bad about asking, because the 12 year old behind the desk in LLoyds-TSB asked that very same question. After putting me on to a woman old enough to be his grandmother (ie about forty), my details were duly copied down (correctly, I checked), the sum of £15 was extracted from my battered looking account on top of the $150 (~£70) and I was promised a phone call on Friday or, at the latest, Monday.

Friday passed. No Word.

Monday arrived. The envelope with all of my other details in it remained unsealed on my desk. I phoned them and was told it should "definately be there Tuesday".

Tuesday, a phone call! I trekked into the bank to pick it up. The woman behind the counter disappeared down to the vault. FIFTEEN minutes later, she arrived looking embarrassed.
"They've made a bit of a mistake with your name. That's why it wasn't here Friday. We sent it back to Head Office because it wasn't on our list. They then sent it back here again."
I looked at the draft. "Bit of a mistake" didn't begin to describe it.
At first, neither of us could work out how the hell they had got the name on the draft from the name on the order (which I double-checked on the carbon copy receipt was spelt correctly in the teller's very neat handwriting). Eventually I figured it out.

They had taken my (extremely common) first name, and misspelt it badly, before using it as my surname. They had then taken the first letter of my middle name and used it as my first initial and the first letter of my surname and used it as my second initial.

Feel free to keep on rereading that paragraph until it makes sense.

What kind of illiterate Fuckwits do LLoyds-TSB employ in their Head Office? Were they high? Having a psychotic episode? Or were they just trying to prove the CBI's claims that today's school leavers are shite?

Fortunately, they hadn't fucked up "The Receiver General For Canada" in the payee line and my garbled name doesn't appear anywhere on the cheque part of the draft, so the bank assures me that it won't be a problem. I will go fucking ballistic if it delays my application though!

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