Rants, raves & the occasional good comment

I’m generally quite a merry chap. It takes a lot for me to get worked up about stuff and I would say I’m generally in a good mood. A trip one fine Saturday morning would change all that (probably for life).

I get notification that my new credit card is ready for collection at NedWanks Eastgate. I think to myself well this should be a simple enough procedure. I’ll pop-in on Saturday morning and pick it up before I go and get a few other things that I need at the shops. I did do the pop-in, unfortunately the pop-out didn’t go my way.

I arrive at NedWanks quite early and I’m quite relieved to see that it’s not really busy. I go and wait in line and there are only 3 or 4 people in front of me. This immediately tricks the customer into some sort of false sense of hope. Besides for the people in the queue there are 2 people being served at the counter, one Chinese women and another bloke.

I would like the bank to have some sort of ranking system for customers. There are certain customers that are going to cause problems no matter what. The bank needs to weed out problem cases. The chinawoman was one such person. Besides for an obvious language barrier I don’t think she quite knew what she had come to the bank to achieve. This somewhat complicates matter. Another minor, very minor, little, tiny problem is that bank tellers who mans (or womans) these counters have the soul of inebriate and the imagination of a pot noodle. They didn’t know what the fuck was cutting. So between the 2 of them it was chaos.

Why I say there should be a ranking system is simply for a situation described above. If a “problem customer” does ever goto the bank they hold the entire queue for everybody else especially when there are only 2 tellers on duty. The one teller is occupied for hours with 1 problem customer. These “problem customers” should only be allowed to come in at non-peak hours to spare everybody else the trouble.

So now the queue is building up and the situation around me is getting rather critical. If there are any entrepreneurs out there I reckon you could make an absolute killing by setting up snack and beverage counters in banks by the queues. I don’t think I have ever encountered this many unhappy people in a single place, with the possible exception of WITS and even then as a percentage the bank still wins hand down. Every customer that came into the bank that day left extremely unhappy.

One such unhappy customer came into the bank for the sole purpose of finding the person at the bank he had spoken to on the phone because he wanted to hit them. (And yes I mean this quite literally) Apparently he had called the bank and they told him he was stupid. Let me tell you something, had this guy got hold of the bank employee I have no doubt he would have thrashed the moron to within an inch of his/her life. Although from this incident I did learn something – the reason they keep that bullet-proof 10inch thick glass between you and the teller is not necessarily in case of a robbery its more for their own protection. The tellers don’t have access to vast amounts of money in any case-that’s in the safe. I can only deduct that the glass is therefore for their protection.

When I enquired why there are only 2 tellers on an extremely busy Saturday morning I got a surprised look, as if the answer was so obvious, that “The otha werkas are going to have a lunch” Hmmm… Dreamin’!


Eventually I get to the front of the queue and I’m really fed up now, over 75 minutes have elapsed and all I need to do is collect an envelope with my card in it. I decide to try have some fun with the teller but it backfired so dramatically I will never try pull this type of shit again.

Teller: “Can I help you sir?”
Me: “I very much doubt that! Originally all I was here to do was to collect my credit but now I want to cancel this account”

When I looked back at the expression on the teller’s face I realised I had hit a brick wall. It would probably take the entire bank as on organisation working together, in unison, to actually manage to close an account – so I gave up.

Me: “Just give me the card so I can leave please”

The teller opens the drawer full of envelopes and it’s quite obvious to anybody on this planet that it’s ordered alphabetically. That anybody actually excludes any bank employee. She was fishing for this envelope for ages before eventually getting it for me. I started to question whether the Chinese lady earlier was actually at fault or whether it was all the bank’s screw-up – difficult to tell really (For any Big Lebowski fans I would like to include this quote “The Chinaman is not the issue here dude!”)

Wow I just realised this may be my longest rant ever and I’ve still got lots to tell so I’ll cut the rest of the story short. There is a pin attached to the new credit card that I wasn’t told about so it never got encoded for me. What this meant is that I couldn’t even use the card after all that and I had to return to the bank a few days later to encode this pin. A similar process repeated itself which I won’t go into.

Let’s tie up this story by simply stating that you should avoid all banks at all costs, because they certainly try avoid the customer at all costs. The conclusion is that now I’m a bitter, unstable person thanks to NedWanks.

Thank you for reading if you were bored (and sad) enough to make it this far!