Standing in the queue at the Bank is one of my favourite people watching sites. A good place to watch for glimpses of rehumanising behaviour. Those electronic voices telling next in line to go to teller number 5 please; cctv, plate glass, warnings about the time delayed lock on the safe; not the most congenial environment for friendly conversation.
In front of me an elderly man, scanning his shiny new bank card, reading it back and front as if memorising the numbers, or trying to decode the electronic logic that somehow translates swiped card into hard cash. As he does, a bigger younger man finishes writing out his pay-in/withdrawal slip, and simply stands in front of him.
Bad manners? Didn’t think? In a hurry?
Whatever, he stayed put and went next, to ‘Teller number 5 please’.
The older man went to ‘Teller number 4 please’ and told the teller (and anyone within 20 feet) he wanted to lift a hundred please. Trying to be discreet, which is hard when the customer is hard of hearing and there is plate glass between you, the teller tries to speak to him in a low voice.
‘Speak up hen; ah cannae hear ye,’ he said.
So she says more loudly, and we all hear it clearly, ‘I’m sorry sir; there isn’t enough in your account to lift that amount. Do you have another card?’
‘No’ he says. ‘But ah’ve two pensions and a’ thocht wan o’ them might have been paid in the day’.
‘I’m sorry’, said Teller Number 4 please. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you’.
To which the answer was a shake of the head, a smile over at the rest of us, and a dignified withdrawal, of himself, through the automatic door.
‘Teller number 4 please’, intoned the electric voice, and I went forward to do my business. Teller number 4 didn’t mention it, neither did I, but we looked at each other with the same sense of admiration at the equanimity with which the elderly man, and we, had just been told he didn’t have a hundred pounds in his only bank account. Not fair to mention Teller Number 4 please’s Christian name in this blog, though she should be named and famed; the way she treated her elderly customer makes me hope there are people like her at the bank when I am old, and not all that well off, and impatient to get my own weekly payouts on time.
These Haiku musings celebrate the gentle arts of courtesy,respect and the compassion that isn’t quite hidden behind the professional role of people like ‘Teller number 4, please’.
…
Clydesdale Haiku
Old man at the bank –
new card, empty account, so
he withdraws, himself.
…
Impersonal banks –
but embarrassed old man hears
kindness behind glass.
…
Blest are the tactful –
courteous empathy smiles
gentle refusal
…
Teller number four –
professional courtesy
preserves dignity.
………………
Prayer
Lord, none of us have enough in our account;
but your love isn’t hampered
by the rules of banking.
So once again,
replenish our poverty,
with the unsearchable riches of Christ.
And please bless ‘Teller number 4 please’,
for her gentle regard for age,
Amen
Decided to play around with inner feelings of being on holiday in autumn. The profusion of yellow, gold and brown, the windy wet drizzly day, the crab apple tree in our front garden, and the increasing irrelevance of harvest thanksgiving as a liturgy for local, rural agriculture in a globalised world – all combine to create a mood mostly playful but with an elegiac hint of Autumn’s annual reminder to us all! I’ve always liked autumn in a kind of sorry to see summer go sort of way – the changing colours of trees and garden, the sense of season’s coming and going, the rhythm of vitality in spring, maturity in summer, fruitfulness in autumn and dormant rest in winter. And maybe also because my roots are in country rather than city. In any case, here’s some of the inner conversation going on just now. 
