Since I managed to bitch and moan my way to a parking space in Cleveland this year, I had the singular pleasure of driving 500 miles out here in a car filled with loosely packed boxes of mostly breakable electronics, foodstuffs, and appliances. This was, of course, quite the odyssey.
As it happened, I had to go to the bank before I left. I went to open a savings account there, so as to keep my savings and checking accounts in one bank. Naturally, I put this errand off until the very last possible minute. The entire process took nearly an hour, and was an enormous pain in the ass. I went into the saleswoman’s office, told her what I wanted to do, and sat mutely for a minute while she typed away on her 486, her face getting more and more worried with every keystroke. She finally broke the news: I didn’t seem to have a checking account there.
Now, since I had been depositing my paychecks there for months, I was naturally a trifle concerned to hear this. The problem was explained after I told the saleswoman that I had opened my checking account in a Cleveland branch of the same bank. It seems that one branch of the bank – Key Bank, as it happens – can’t communicate with the other, so while I could use the ATM in Schenectady to make deposits, the accounts couldn’t be linked. This sort of killed my reason for opening the account in the first place, but I was already there and so did nothing as the saleswoman bustled off for consultations.
She came back a few minutes later with a solution of sorts. To make a long story short, I now have three bank accounts, one of which has no money in it, and two debit cards, one of which is for the bank account with no money in it. Convenient? You bet!
The whole thing was, as I said, a huge pain in the ass, and needlessly so. There is no reason, with modern technology and so forth, that all of the Key Bank branches shouldn’t function as one bank. For that matter, I shouldn’t even have had to see a saleswoman – she didn’t do anything but type for me and tell me what I couldn’t do. So far as I’m concerned, opening a bank account should be no harder than ordering a cheeseburger. The banking industry has come a long way towards making their business as easy as all things should be, with the ATM and direct deposit. Today, I can handle 95% of all my banking without catching sight of a human being, or even a bank. This is the way it should be, but it seems that there’s some ways yet to go.
Anyhow, all of this banking, combined with one last “free” lunch at my parents’ house, meant that I didn’t get out of Schenectady until nearly one o’clock. The office at school where I went to get my key and whatnot closes at six o’clock, so making the trip to Cleveland all in that day was basically impossible – Brian Greppo can probably manage 500 miles (or 476.8, more precisely) in four hours, but it took me eight. I was faced with the choice of spending a night in one of the two least pleasant places in the world: Schenectady or Buffalo. The car was packed, so I chose Buffalo.
Being that Buffalo sucks, I can honestly say that getting there was half the fun.
Five-hour car rides are boring as hell. Particularly boring is the long stretch between Syracuse and Rochester, where exits are few and far between, and you’re denied even the stimulation of having to get into the left-hand lane. I’m sure that you’d concur, Mr. Rock. It was at a rest stop there in the dullest part of my home state that I encountered a phenomenon which left me speechless – the Aiken Moms.
The Aiken Moms, as their name suggests, are a group of middle-aged woman Clay Aiken groupies. Clay Aiken, as his name suggests, is a twerp. These people had t-shirts with his picture on them and everything. It was mind boggling to think that such people exist, and there they were, right before my eyes. Fortunately, they numbered but a mini-van load, though we can take small comfort in this: the Nazi party, too, had eight people in it at one point, and the Aiken Moms represent at least as great a threat to Christian Civilization. I shudder to think of their children, raised by Teletubbies while their mothers are off chasing the American Idol, growing up to become the next generation of personal injury lawyers.
In spite of the sometimes tempting urge to fall asleep at the wheel just for excitement, I made it to Buffalo. More precisely, I made it to Hamburg, NY, a suburb of Buffalo that sports a handsome water-tower that’s visible from the Thruway (here’s a hint: the water-tower is the main attraction). I stayed at a Red Roof Inn, which, I was delighted to discover, had an alarm clock in every room.
Some might not think an alarm clock too much to ask of a hotel room, but I once stayed at an Econo-Lodge in Elyria, OH, which didn’t even have that. I was understandably appalled, particularly since getting up in time to make the check out time without an alarm clock is sort of a crapshoot. Now that I think about it, though, I paid almost twice as much for the Red Roof Inn as for the Econo-Lodge, and $40.00 is a bit much for an alarm clock. Somewhere in there, I got screwed.
So, in the morning, after a huge breakfast at Bob Evans, the world’s greatest restaurant (so say I), I proceeded to Cleveland, where I am now.
This year, unlike certain lazy geniuses that I could name, I have my very own room. It is the size of a prison cell, with furnishings to match, but the building that it’s in is scheduled to be dynamited in June, so I can more or less fuck up the room however much I want, and no one will get on my case. One of the other guys in my suite busted a hole in his wall to put a cable line through.
The downside to this is that the building will only be dynamited in June if it does not fall down of its own accord in the meantime. From my window, for instance, I can spot at least a dozen places where a chunk of concrete the size of my head or larger has come off of the exterior wall and crashed to earth, leaving a tangle of rebar behind. Another guy was pounding nails into the wall to hang a picture, and a bunch of wall came out with the nail when he tried to put weight on it. We have all agreed not to stand on one side of the building at the same time.
That just about concludes this rather long rant. I’ll be auctioning off the next chunk of concrete to fall, so I’ll keep you posted.
{democracy:3}