Excuse me while I push cards, limits

elisa l. lenssen

traveler's check

I just wrote a long complaint letter to the Halifax bank corporation. But it wasn’t satisfying. I’m not sure you can really understand just how unsatisfying it was. The writing process went far more quickly than any Grinnell paper I’ve ever written and yet even writing a 25-pager made due the Monday after Thanksgiving by a professor who has a 70 page paper due the day before the final exam and makes you get up at 3 a.m. to observe how the night air makes your 10 pound textbook glimmer would be more satisfying than this. Far more.

So this past Sunday, I’m withdrawing money from a cash machine about a block from where my flat is. Somehow, my card (First Federal, Grinnell, Iowa … actually previously, one British salesperson exclaimed how horrible a bank called First Funeral was. At the time I jollily corrected her, but now it seems the genuine omen of a ghastly debacle. Give me S&M Bank, Hells’ Fargo …) gets stuck: one half inside the machine, one half dangling dastardly out of my reach yet in my sight. I send my companion off to get tweezers. In the meanwhile, this horrible not precious meanwhile, a British man behind me with a shiny messenger bag and greasy hair proceeds to inspect the situation, ignore my explanations and take his bank card and jam my bank card all the way in. He pushed my card in! He lost my card! He did not help! He hurt! He ruined! Can you imagine just how excruciating this experience was? Imagine observing an old woman push your jaguar off a cliff: you’re so stunned that such an action could take place, you can’t adequately respond. To this smarmy Samaritan, I think I managed a garbled “oh, that’s great” before I slipped into bamboozled British complacency and politeness and just commented “hmm” and “oh dear” as he puttered about putting on a show of concern before pedaling off on his bike with his card safe and sound in search of another queue. “Q” stands for quagmire. The tweezers arrived, but it was too late. I was harried and the one mane situation remained: no money, no cash, no successful Samaritans, just god-awful ones.

And the bank people proved to be a hostile plague of biblical proportions. But first, I saved myself from fear and indulged in shopping sin. Losing your money source makes you do weird things. For instance, two hours after losing my card, I paid money to shop for clothes. Not to buy clothes, just to look at them. Wandering around in a random neighborhood (after once again being foiled by a closed system (museum closed)), I came upon an absurd mecca of collegiate hipsters. One alleyway, about the length of the south loggia, teemed with hipsters who seemed to have no inkling how ridiculous this mass compression of creased jeans, scarves, sour expressions and insanely flammable hair was. It was a hideous hipster happening. Maybe yes, I am overdoing the hipster thing. I did overdo it. Hipster hipster hipster. Likely overdone due to the fact that my left hip felt lighter than normal as the crisp shining green ATM card that usually lived there was STUCK IN SOME SLOT, forced there by SOME SHITTY SAMARITAN. Bygones. Buy gones! Then I bought a hat. And then beer. And when my friend was stiffed at the cash register, I did a little jig. Though not really, because at that time the jig was just about up.

The bank wouldn’t give me my card back. They held it up so I could gaze at it through the glass. But it was just bitter bait. The bank wouldn’t give me my card back. They assumed I was a criminal. They cut it up. They said the machine was never faulty. Two hours later I walked past said machine and it was flashing an “out of service” sign. Yep. Happy days, happy days. I called Iowa. (My bank there, actually, although being able to call Iowa might be effective. Like, say, calling the white house). A lovely woman named Joy answered and spent two hours investigating, but turns out no new card until I can come in and sign a paper in person. So, no cash until the end of January. That was my last tie to Grinnell. A wad of savings unwound. Until then, it’s fasting and disheveling and living on a budget the size of my professional marketability and current interest in academia or the future. What have I learned studying abroad and writing this column? We are all our own angry, unreliable, unsound disappointed/disappointing narrators. It’s funny—the column sometimes—but more the fact that though Grinnell’s nicer than London, really the end result is the same. Delirious improvisation and an endearing/enduring audience. Go.