reflections on the world
When I travelled to the US, I left some amount in my bank account that I can’t remember anymore now. I also had a debit card just in case I find myself stranded on returning to the country and I have to use some money. It was a little surprise then to find out on returning to my bank last week that very many changes have taken place. One of them was that old debit cards were no longer tenable and that customers had to get new ones. Now, here’s the snag: you had to pay for the new card.
I have never figured out how financial institutions functioned, but I know that they are supposed to make their money only from trading with the funds we deposit into their care. The rude awakening to me then on return there to the help desk was that not only would they profit from changing my debit cards, but from my monthly use of it.
So here it is: to change my card due to a sudden change in policy which I didn’t authorize or have any voice in formulating, I pay up to 600 naira. And then – the most annoying (fine print) clause in the new debit card application form – I get to pay 105 naira every month for keeping the said debit card. Access charge, they called it. This part, I really still couldn’t understand. What it means of course is that when next I leave some money in the bank and I travel out of the country, it is possible that by the time I return – depending on how long I spend out of the country – there might not be anything left in the account. The bank would remove it every month to service my unused debit card. So there. This is not just an unfair business practice, and greed, it capitalism at some of its worst.
Needless to say, I went to a branch of the bank yesterday to ask them to close my account, and the staff at the desk responded that I have to go to the branch where I first registered the account before I could close it. But I registered the bank account while I was a Youth Corper in Jos five years ago! She gave me a straight face and a shrug. “That’s the company policy,” she said. “You have to go back to Jos to close it.” While she was saying this, the television flashed an update in the security situation in Jos. Three Fulani nomad cattle herders had been killed again, and the city would become volatile again from now on.
So here I am, already decided as to what to do next: withdraw everything drawable from my account, and erase the bank from my memory. I’m just another lost customer that can be ignored, I guess, but I at least have a safe haven on the internet where I can vent my anger. Bye bye now UBA. 
Now let’s see what GTB has to offer.
I was bored on Thursday – don’t say “as usual” – so I took to counting the bunch of coins that have now begun to be a nuisance to my table. Yes, I love coins, and I’d love to keep some as souvenirs, but I have over the past months acquired so many of them that I have begun to worry that if I don’t stop paying for stuff in cash, I may soon run out of places to keep them. So I decided to spend them all, but not before counting to find out just how much I have in cash. Yes, I know, rich people don’t count their money.
I’ve now sorted the dimes, quarters, pennies, five cents and dollar coins, with the following results:
Dollars coins = 6 pieces
Quarters = 6 pieces
Dimes = 51 pieces
Five cents = 19 pieces
Pennies = 88 pieces
Apparently,
6 dollars =$6.00
6 quarters =$1.50
51 dimes =$5.10
19 five cents=$0.95
88 pennies =$0.88
So therefore, my total coin balance is… 5+8= 13… that’s a 3 ($0.03). We carry 1 over to the other side. 1+5+1+9+8=24. We leave 4 and carry the other 2 over to the other side. ($0.43) Hmm. 2+6+1+5=14. That’s right. I have $14.43 lying idly on my table. I’m rich, it seems. But not for long, my friends… The next time I go shopping, all the dimes, pennies and five cents are going to go. Enough is enough. I’ve never done this much math in my adult life 
.
Seriously!
It has taken me some time to get used to spending dimes, quarters, and cents, and whenever I bought something whose price sounded like $7.11, all I had to do was pay the $7 with the notes I have, then bring out the numerous coins I have in my pocket, open my palms and let the cashier pick out the remaining 11cents herself. I mean which country is this that still spends coins when everything could be made in notes/bills? Couldn’t they have at least taken some lesson from Africa’s most populous country where less than three months after the coins are issued, nobody else accepts them from you except the surrendered taxi drivers on the campus of a few (in)sane Universities (like Ibadan). So here I was trying to grapple with the fact that a dollar consists of four quarters, ten dimes and a hundred cents. Bull! Bloody waste of precious time if you ask me, especially for this travula who must always first do a mental conversion of each of those amount he spends in dollars to Naira before he pays for the order. Yea, yea, I know I shouldn’t still be thinking in Naira by now. But what shall a man do when his income is not unlimited? Sigh.
And so it was even a greater wonder to find out that almost everything here takes money from you, mostly the coins. If you park your car at a parking meter, you put money in it. If you were speeding too much, the police would stop you and make you pay for a ticket. If you wanted a condom, or a drink of soda, there is a machine you could go and put a coin into, and your product would be dispensed immediately. I first saw the one for condoms at Heathrow airport. Who could have thought that somebody is already smart enough to know that people may wish to have sex while on a plane? My final wonder about vending machines came on Saturday when I had to do some washing. Interestingly there was a self-serviced laundry machine service in house #429. All you had to do was put in a dollar and your clothes would be washed clean. The only problem I had with that was the fact that the machine only took coins. And it was my first time.
Now when Reham, my co FLTA from Egypt first took me into the laundry, all she said was, “You put your clothes in here, a dollar in here, in coins, and then press this. The machine would tell you how many minutes you have to wait and you can come back to pick your clothes. Then you take them out again, and put them in this other machine, put another dollar, in coins, press this, and it will tell you when to come and pick it. This second one is meant to dry them up.” What she didn’t say was that one also had to put some some detergent in the first machine. By the time I discovered this fact, my clothes had spent thirty-eight minutes in the machine, they were wet but they were not washed, and I had paid a dollar. I was vexed. All that money, and I still have to put in detergent myself! I was even more annoyed because prior to this oversight, I had wasted some three more quarters in a similar washing machine in this same building on this same day. What happened was that I had put in only three quarters, and failing to find one last quarter, I took the other coins I had with me (which turned out to be dimes and cents) and put them in the machine, hoping that it would just do the math and let me go. The machine refused to collect them (I later found out that it collected ONLY quarters) and it also refused to refund my three quarters already put in. Who says machines don’t have criminal minds?
Now when I buy coffee and the cashier begins to look for change. Instead of saying, “Oh, you may keep that”, I stiffen up my upper lip as a now smarter Nigerian, and say “Oh, make that change in quarters, please. Thank you very much.”
SOPA breaks our internet freedom!
Any site can be shut down whether or not we've done anything wrong.
