A RICH AMERICAN preacher always reminded his followers that, contrary to biblical teaching, money was not “the root of all evil”. Instead, he proposed that it was “the lack of money” which was responsible for most of the world’s problems.
According to the Americans, “Money talks . . .”. And John King, one of our calypsonians, tells us what the world would be like “if money could talk . . . it would get a sore throat . . .”.
Regardless of the source of the money, however, most of it, sooner or later, ends up either in the local or the foreign banks. And nobody cares if it was obtained as a result of praedial, pastoral, white collar, white colour, or corporate “tiefing”.
Money always finds a home in the bank, where it attracts the attention of honest people who want to borrow some of it, or unsavoury characters who want to rob the bank. And sometimes the money attracts the attention of certain desperate employees of the bank who dip their hands into it and, occasionally, find themselves before the law courts.
There is a big difference, however, between a bank robbery and robbery by a bank. A few years ago I had an unforgettable experience with one bank. Having been a customer for the previous 20 years, without any negative incidents, I lapsed into a false sense of security and failed to maintain the required vigilance.
My business had been on a strong financial footing, so there was no need, or so I foolishly thought, to pay strict attention to the balance of my chequing account. It was only after a number of cheques suddenly bounced, that I realised three of my “night deposits” had either disappeared into thin air or into somebody’s thick pockets.
In a panic, I rushed to the bank only to be told by my female “personal banker” that my account, which had always been protected by an overdraft facility, had been overdrawn, and that my only recourse was to increase the amount of the overdraft.
When the bank was ready to credit my account with the three deposits, three months later, I received a note and an apology for the error and the “inconvenience”. By this time, however, my account and my business were in tatters.
I was offered some rather asinine excuses by the bank’s officers. One corpulent lady informed me that my night deposits had been credited to the account of another customer, because I had omitted the digit “7” from the account number. It did not matter to her that I had never used that digit before! Another officer who, incredibly, is now the CEO of a popular financial institution, told me, inanely, and with a straight face, that my account was identical, numerically, with another one, so the deposits were accidentally credited to that account. It would be an interesting exercise to trace the financial footprints of the new CEO!
My pleas to the bank’s officers to inform the offended parties that the rubberised cheques in their possession were not the result of any skulduggery on my part, fell on deaf ears. And since the bank had, recently, adopted a policy (then unique in the banking system) of refusing to return cancelled cheques to their customers, I had nothing to show. I could not prove that the cheques had, indeed, taken flight. Nor could I prove that I had actually placed the plastic money bag, which contained the deposit, in the so-called “night depository”, because the bank takes an unusually long time before it returns the pink duplicate which accompanies the deposit.
Finally, the bank admitted, to my lawyer, that only one cheque had bounced, and a bagatelle was offered. The pettifogger had never demanded compensation for the invisible deposits, and none was offered by the bank.
I never gave up on the bank that put me through the ringer and almost ruined me, financially. But I have, finally, come to the realisation that, in this dog-eat-dog world, there is nobody one can trust where money is concerned; indeed, ‘’a fool and his money are soon parted”!
– CALVIN GARNES
