Columnists
In the steps of Leacock
Were you required to read Stephen Leacock in high school? Do you remember My Financial Career, his story about a fumbling attempt to open, and then close, a bank account? My banking career took a similar embarrassing turn this past week.
My Leacockian experience began with my assumption of the job of treasurer of a local not-for-profit group—a position that was somewhat giddily relinquished by the incumbent, reeling from his good fortune after sixteen years of failed attempts to shuck the responsibility. My briefing consisted of the hasty handover of an overflowing cardboard box, together with the encouraging comment that he was sure I could figure it out, but that if I did have any questions, I could leave a message for him through the Canadian embassy in Panama.
I pored over the contents of the box and after four or five hours, concluded he was right. There were only a couple of transactions each month. So, breathing a sigh of relief and putting on a suitable air of officiousness, I set about organizing myself a binder full of sections for bank statements, financial reports, meeting minutes and so forth. I was ready for action.
Now one of the main fundraising activities of this group is a sale that is run every Canada Day and at Pumpkinfest. Since I had assumed the office in the halcyon days of post-2015 Pumpkinfest, Canada Day was to be my first experience handling the proceeds.
Collecting those proceeds and bringing them home—without any security detail, I might add—went off without incident. And then the pleasant work of counting the money began. Except that it wasn’t. At my first attempt, I came up with $1,088.55. In the spirit of double-entry bookkeeping, I counted it again, and came up with $1,011.25. So I counted it again, and came up with $1,199.60. By this time, I was fending off calls from the group’s president who just wanted to know how we did. I couldn’t very well tell him that so far, I had come up with three possibiilities, and that there would likely be others if I kept at it. My only hope lay in having the bank verify the exact amount.
So Monday morning, I was one of the first customers to approach a teller and proudly announce, Leacock style, that I had a deposit to make. I handed her my notes, all subtotalled and, as far as I was concerned, neatly categorized. However, she couldn’t completely disguise her reaction, which I think would have been similar if a skunk had wandered across her workstation.
I would by lying if I said I then pulled out an attache case with multiple combination locks, handcuffed to my wrist. In fact, I presented several Tupperware containers, each packed inside the other, one containing quarters, one containing loonies, one containing toonies; except for the nickels and dimes, for which I couldn’t find a vessel that fit, so I had just thrown them together in an envelope and stuffed it in with my bills—thereby compromising my ability to adopt a systematic approach and calling into question the reliability of my figures.
And so we went through the subtotals, deciphering and changing each as if our lives depended upon it. “Now, I see that in 10-dollar bills you have added it up to be $402; whereas I get $510,” she said. My shoddy attempts at accuracy were being exposed. I grew even more uncomfortable as the lineup for available tellers kept growing and the increasing clucking and grumbling seemed to hone in on me as the source of the logjam. Finally, I heard her pronounce the magic phrase “and the grand total is …,” which of course was different from any figure I had previously come up with. I thanked her and apologized for taking so much of her time, to which she replied “Oh, don’t worry. We get people like you doing this sort of thing all time.
“Well, I suppose you’d like these guys back,” she said, handing me my Tupperware containers and nickel and dime envelope just as my neighbour, a truly sophisticated investor who knows all about bond yields and equity derivatives, walked past me having finished his business at a nearby teller. “What are those for?” he asked. “Are you offering them snacks so they’ll give you an extra basis point on your savings?” I mumbled something about indexed futures and turned my back on him to pretend I was still deeply immersed in conversation with my teller.
Only 15 more years of this humiliation, I thought as I left, and then the job will fall to someone else, who can leave a message for me with the Canadian embassy in the Cayman Islands if there are any questions. But at least my ordeal was over—until Pumpkinfest. And I had walked in the steps of Leacock.
Comments (0)