One of the differences in my personality vs my husband’s is that I expect to figure things out as I go, and he prefers to know things in advance. Say we are going to a concert in the park. He will go online, map out the directions, look at parking. He will probably visit the park website to see if there is any information about parking. This is all fine and good and useful. I, on the other hand, would probably plug the park address into my navigator on the way to the concert and figure out parking when I get there. I trust that most things will be easy enough to figure out as you go along, and I think I’ve mainly been right about that. This is not to say that my husband’s methodology is wrong – and it has plenty of benefits. It’s just different.
When it was time to wire our down payment to the title company, I figured it would be pretty intuitive. Just go to the bank with the wiring instructions, and the money would be wired. Easy peasy lemon squeeze. My reasoning is that banks deal with this kind of thing all the time. Sending a wire may be an unusual occurrence for us, but this is something banks do all the time. There must be systems in place.
My husband was not willing to leave it at that and had me ask the title company agent what we should do. (He was in the hospital, so I was left to this task.) The title company agent told me that we needed to go in a day or two early, to make sure the money was wired on the date of closing, but that any teller should be able to make the wire transfer. This satisfied me, and since I was the one doing the actual wire transfer, I felt good about it.
This, my friends, is what is known as “foreshadowing.”
But. If a blog is good for anything, it is for sharing one’s most humiliating moments publicly and in perpetuity.
Two days before our closing, I went to the bank.
I need to pause for a moment and describe the bank to you. You walk in the door and are immediately greeted by a small welcome desk. I have been a patron at this bank for more than a decade and I don’t think I have ever seen a human at the welcome desk, but it is there just in case. The welcome desk is positioned in roughly the center of the bank. To the left are offices; to the right is a big upside-down-L-shaped bank of counters behind which the tellers stand. There are spaces for at least eight tellers; on this day there were two tellers in attendance which is neither here nor there but between that and the welcome desk, I’m guessing this branch may have staffing issues. In front of the tellers is a big open space for patrons to wait in a cordoned off multi-server queue. There is also a large desk in this area that has pens, deposit slips, and advertisements for various services the bank offers; this desk does not feature prominently in the story to follow, but I included it in the drawing so I feel like I need to describe it to you. I have included a rendering of the interior of the bank for your reference. It is not to scale.
Two days before the closing on our new house, I went to the bank. I stood in line to wait for a teller. One teller was, I think, counting money using a very loud machine. Thpthpthpthpthpthpthp went the bills as the machine organized them into neat stacks. The only other teller was helping a very elderly man who had visible hearing aids. He was having trouble communicating with the teller and kept asking her what she’d said. I felt bad for this poor guy who could hardly hear, especially with all the noise of the money counting machine, which would fall silent and then comically renew its thpthpthp efforts every time the teller began to speak.
When I’d arrived, it was just me and one other person. But as I waited for the elderly man ahead of me to finish his halting interaction with the teller, people filed in behind me. The second teller finished counting money and took her position at the drive through window. The elderly man finished his business and I was next.
I explained to the teller that I needed to wire money for a down payment on a house.
“Oh,” she said, “mumble mumble something.”
Aha. So it wasn’t that the elderly man was hard of hearing, it was that the teller did not know how to project her voice through the plexiglass window and across the counter. Or perhaps a lethal combination of both.
I asked her to repeat herself.
“I can’t help you with that,” she said, more loudly, and in that forced-calm way that makes it seem like it’s my fault for not being able to hear her. “You need to meet with a banker.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’d like to meet with a banker then.”
“You have to go sign in on the whiteboard,” she said.
“The whiteboard?”
She motioned toward the front of the bank. “The whiteboard. Right when you come in. At the front, by the door.”
Okay. I thanked her and went back to the front of the store and looked for the whiteboard.
Let’s all take a minute and ask ourselves what a whiteboard might look like. This is what I pictured:
I could not find a whiteboard near the front of the bank. I looked around, scanning the walls, scanning the welcome desk.
“Right there,” the teller called. She had been watching me and was now directing me across the heads of many people waiting for her.
I looked. I turned in a circle, panic building as I continued to not see a whiteboard. Or anything resembling a whiteboard. Or even a clipboard or a sign up sheet or a notepad. The teller pointed, which was, ironically, pointless, because she was all the way across the room. “Right there! Right in front of you! The whiteboard!”
Internet, I cannot even describe to you my bafflement. There was a desk and NOTHING ON IT. Where was this whiteboard that she could see and I could not? It was not on the desk, it was not on the floor. I was sure – SURE – that the teller thought it was there, because it was normally there, but maybe no one had put it out yet that morning? I could feel the eyes of all the people in the line, waiting for their banking needs to be addressed by this lone teller or perhaps waiting to find out how long we could keep up this hilarious prank.
“RIGHT THERE,” the teller yelled across the bank. Finally, in a fit of descriptive genius she said, “Leaning against the wall!”
I looked to my left. Against the wall indeed something leaned. Was it a whiteboard? Apparently, in this teller’s mind, it was. I will let you be the judge:
I will share my opinion: This is not a whiteboard. This is a fucking A-frame sign that my eyes dismissed as an advertisement.
The sign was leaning against the wall just to the left of the door. Leaning, out of eyeline, as though it had been closed up for the day. It was not standing on top of the welcome desk, which would not have transformed it into a whiteboard, but would possibly have caught my eye.
I have added an X to the diagram of the bank, indicating the location of the not-a-whiteboard:
“This?” I asked, gesturing to the sign that I had not even acknowledged because it bore so tenuous a relationship to the word “whiteboard” in my mind, my face by now aflame and my pulse rapid in my throat. The horde of bank patrons looked on as the teller said, in tones of my-god-I-thought-I’d-have-to-hit-you-over-the-head-with-it, “Yes.”
I like to think that I would have eventually noticed and examined the sign, had I not been so completely befuddled by the spotlight of the teller’s attention. But perhaps I really am that dumb; who’s to say.
“Oh I see,” I said, not sure whether I was speaking to her or the other patrons or myself, “I just scan it and then sign in that way?”
A woman materialized behind the welcome desk. She would have been much more welcome, to me at least, a few moments prior to this little drama.
“Hi,” she said smoothly. “If you just scan the QR code, you’ll be able to sign in. You’ll get a few questions and I can walk you through how to answer them.”
I was so flustered I could hardly see. My hands were trembling under the pressure of all those eyes. But I managed to open my camera and scan the QR code, like the tech-savvy millennial I pretend to be.
“It should pre-load a number in your text messages, and you just hit send,” the woman directed, her voice low and soothing as though I might at any moment startle and take flight or maybe bare my teeth at her and growl. She was there to avert another scene as much as she was to help.
I dutifully sent the text; I was so discombobulated that I honestly don’t know if I could have figured out what to do by myself.
I understand and value technology. I do. But just because a technological tool may make simplify or improve workflow for the staff of a company doesn’t mean it is useful or workable for its customers. If I hadn’t been so publicly floundering, I don’t know that I would have gotten any help. I might still be there, in that bank, looking for an invisible whiteboard.
“You’ll get a text,” the woman explained, “and you just need to answer ‘yes.'”
A few long seconds passed and I got a reply text with some ridiculously simple question, like “Do you have an appointment today? 1. Yes 2. No” and the woman, reading over my shoulder said, “Now, type in a 2 and hit send.” She walked me through the remaining questions, all equally basic – “What are you here to do? 1. Deposit 2. Set up account 3. Withdrawal 4. Other” and “What is your name?” and “Do you have an account here?” etc. I could feel the eyes of the remaining patrons on me, curious to learn just how much help I really needed or possibly feeling grateful they were safely on the other side of the crowd control stanchions and far away from this check-in process.
Finally, I reached the end of the text questions – the “sign in process” – and I got a text that said, “Thank you! A banker will be with you shortly!”
That’s when the calming woman said, “Great! Thank you for signing in. I can help you right now.”
Picture me blinking rapidly as though something had short-circuited in my brain.
I followed her back to her office. We sat down. I explained to her why I was there: we would be closing in two days, my title company advised me to come and set up the wire in advance.
“Oh, we can’t pre-schedule a wire transfer,” she said.
I stared at her. “But… we haven’t signed closing documents yet. I don’t want to wire the money until the date of closing.”
She nodded. “I understand. But the wire transfer occurs the same day we schedule it.” She left her office briefly to double check that this was true with a colleague.
When she returned, she smiled at me pityingly.
“You’ll have to come back in two days,” she said. “I’ll make an appointment for you, so you don’t have to go through that again.”
life of a doctor's wife 