On the perils of not having a mobile banking app

by Phil Lemos

A couple weeks ago I started a new job.  When I was in the HR office signing reams of paperwork, including a direct deposit pay sheet, they told me for the first pay cycle I might receive a paper check.

This morning I trudge downstairs to check the mail and see, as predicted, a check from my employer.  I glance at the grey skies outside.  The check, of course, would arrive on a morning when we’re expecting a foot of snow. Honestly, I’d rather stay holed up in my apartment.  But the only thing I want less than being out and about during a snowpocalypse is to have a paper check lying around, undeposited.  The nearest branch of my bank is about 10 minutes away. I make a dash for it. 

I walk into the branch, endorse the back of the check and walk up to the teller.  Even in the era of automatic bank transfers, it seems like such a simple task.  Sign, hand over, receive deposit receipt.  In and out.

There are three people in line in front of me, engaged in various transactions and running into various snags in the process, which lengthens my wait time.  After 10 minutes, I draw Sasha in the bank teller window lottery.  Sasha looks at the check, asks me a couple of questions, glances at the computer screen in front of her, and I think I’m on my way when she asks:

“It appears you don’t have our mobile check deposit app,” Sasha says.

Yeah…so what?  I’m here.  It appears I don’t need it right now.

“If you had it, you could take a picture of your check and deposit it electronically,” she continues.

I don’t say anything.  All I want to do is deposit this check and get home before the roads become too slick.  I look behind me, out the window, and I see the first snowflakes begin to fall.

“I’ll go print the form out so we can set it up for you,” Sasha says.

“Honestly,” I say, “I just want to deposit this and leave before the storm hits.”

“Oh, no, it’ll be really quick.  I’ll be right back.”

“I SAID….”

Sasha freezes.  The teller in the other window, stops in the middle of her transaction to look at me.  The other customer, an older lady who clearly also doesn’t have the mobile app but isn’t being trolled about it, looks at me, petrified, as if thinking, “This is how my life ends.”  Someone who appears to be a branch manager type, who had just emerged from an office, freezes in place.

I glance upward and, for the first time, notice that I’m also wearing a winter hat and, inexplicably for such a gloomy day, sunglasses that I forgot to remove upon entrance as per bank branch protocol.  

“Is everything OK?” the other teller asks.

I lower my voice slightly. 

“I said…I want to deposit this and go home before the snow gets out of control.  We can sign me up another time.”

Sasha forgets about setting me up with that app.  She completes the transaction and hands me a deposit slip.  Nobody in the building has uttered a word since I spoke.  “Thank you,” I say, as I leave the branch.

I’ve weaponized my voice many times before.  My voice carries, and I have a way of treating every life obstacle, such as maintaining proper work flow, or impending snow, like a crisis-level event.  At my old warehouse job, I yelled so loudly the entire building could hear, and was asked on more than one occasion if I have Viking blood in me. This weaponization is not something I’m necessarily proud of, and I’ve had uncomfortable meetings with everyone from my bosses to HR to discuss it.

I get home, safely sheltered before the snow slickens the road.  A couple of days later I receive an email.

“As a valued customer of The Bank, your feedback is vital to help us improve the services we provide. You are invited to participate in a brief online survey regarding your recent visit.”

I rate my recent interaction with Sasha with all 5’s (“indispensable service”).  Two days ago, I would’ve hit the radio buttons on the opposite end of the spectrum.  But I’ve had time to think about how I conducted myself.

Also, I really need to download that mobile banking app.

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Phil Lemos is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Chill, Baby

by Nadia Owusu

There was, as is often the case, no warning that the G train would not be running past midnight. No flyers or posters. No announcements on the A train telling passengers not to bother getting off to transfer. Nothing. The woman on the microphone at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Street station sounded thrilled about this inconvenience even as she apologized for it.  

I was pissed off because nobody came into the restaurant for dinner that night so I didn’t make any money. I only had two thirds of my rent that was due in a week. I was going to have to pick up shifts during finals. I stood around all night polishing wine glasses and folding napkins instead of studying for my statistics exam. Tonight would be another sleepless one. There would probably be crying. I usually cried when I studied for math tests because I’m very bad at math. Doing things that I’m very bad at makes me sad about all the things in the world that I will probably never really understand, like electricity and Einstein's general theory of relativity.

During my shift, the bartender I was in the process of breaking up with had gotten drunk and annoying. He flirted all night with that blonde woman from across the street, and not just in the compulsory bartender way. She came to see him every night, even in this snowstorm. Usually he was polite to her, but disinterested. She had thick, square, acrylic French-manicured nails. She wore sticky pink lip gloss. She always started out her evening with a Sex on the Beach. Her voice sounded like her acrylic nails on a chalkboard. But, he leaned over the bar and looked into her eyes. He probably talked to her about his art, how he’d dropped out of law school for it. I did not like the thought of him sharing that part of himself, the part I liked, with her. So what if I had ignored his phone calls for three days? I was supposed to be the one ending it, not him. And now the stupid G train wasn’t running.

I kicked an empty forty bottle that someone had discarded on the platform. It was still wrapped tightly in a brown paper bag. It rolled unsatisfyingly for a few seconds then stopped at a middle-aged Rasta’s feet. He had his head tipped up as though waiting for further instruction from the MTA. I was not holding my breath for any such thing. We were, I knew, on our own.

“Chill, baby,” he said.

I hate it when random men call me ‘baby,’ especially when they’re telling me what to do. I might have told him as much. I thought about it. I was in the mood for it. But I had kicked a bottle at him so I didn’t exactly hold the moral high ground. I scowled at him instead.

“I hear ya,” he said, even though I hadn’t said anything. “How we supposed to get home?”

“Yeah,” I said.

There was a bus that would get me close enough to walk to my apartment. Not as close as the G train, but closer than the A train. I had never taken that bus but I knew it existed because my friend Sarah who lived down the street was always going on and on about how she took it everywhere. She talked about taking the bus the way people talk about juice detoxes and meditation which is weird because there’s nothing about the bus that is healthier than the train. At least nothing I can think of.

Outside, the snow was still coming down in heavy, sharp white pellets. It was the kind of snow that made opening an umbrella look pitiful. I buttoned the coat button that pinches the skin under my chin. I had to do that so my hood would not blow off in the whooshing wind. Google on my cellphone told me that the bus stop was six blocks away. The bus, I thought, better be running as usual. My brain said this in threatening tones. I needed the universe to know that I meant business.

What’s nice about walking in a snowstorm when you’re somewhat unreasonably miserable is that it makes your misery more reasonable. I don’t mind snowstorms when I don’t have to go anywhere except down the street to my favorite hole-in-the-wall for a hot toddy, or when I can stay indoors reading books and making soup. I do mind them under most other circumstances.

There were very few cars out that night; very few pedestrians. Downtown Brooklyn didn’t feel peaceful though. It felt abandoned. It felt like everyone was safe and sound at home except for me. I blamed a lot of people for this. I didn’t care if my reasoning was irrational. I was not interested in considering association versus causality. Perhaps this tendency is why I was having such a hard time with Statistics II.

It was my landlord’s fault for raising the rent by $150 when I was already struggling to pay it. I knew that this would happen when the hipsters moved in. I blamed those hipsters and their rich parents. I blamed my parents for not being rich. I blamed the university I attended for being so expensive. I blamed financial aid for not covering my whole tuition. It was the bartender’s fault for flirting with that blonde woman and making me jealous enough to stay at the restaurant for an hour after closing time to drink whiskey with him. The MTA was the worst institution that ever existed. Never mind that it ran trains and buses twenty-four hours a day so that I didn’t have to own a car. The G train wasn’t running right now. I also had a bone to pick with the mathematicians who developed theoretical and applied statistics.

I was walking with my head down so that the snow didn’t attack my eyeballs. They’re very sensitive. Walking in that way made it difficult to see where I was going. I had to stop every block to check whether or not I had arrived at the corner where I was supposed to turn left. My sense of direction is very poor. I was standing on Atlantic and Nevins when something large and brown leapt past me and into the street. A bus, perhaps my bus, rolled over it. The bus kept going, leaving the street empty and white again, except for a mangy mutt that was now bleeding red into the snow.

The mutt was silent. I rushed over to where it was lying. Its belly had been crushed and split open. The sight of its exposed flesh and guts filled my lungs with freezing oxygen. It—he—was dead.  As far as I could see, there hadn’t been anything or anyone chasing him, nothing to spook him. I wanted to touch his nose but as I bent down and reached out my hand, I started to shake.

“Hey sweetheart,” called out a man wearing a backpack with a hard hat tied to it, “you okay?”

I don’t like it when off-duty construction workers I don’t know call me ‘sweetheart,’ but it didn’t seem important in that moment.

“There’s a dead dog in the road,” I yelled at him.

“Why?” he asked.

That the mutt had been hit by a bus was not the answer to that question. It was only a consequence.

“I don’t know,” I yelled. I didn’t need to yell. He wasn’t very far away. Maybe I wasn’t yelling at him.

I felt ridiculous standing in the street now, so I joined the construction worker on the sidewalk. The two of us stood in silence, looking at the mutt.

“That’s the way it is sometimes,” he said after a while. “It was probably the snow.”

What he meant by that last part, I did not know. But, I nodded and started walking towards the bus stop again. This time, I let it snow into my eyeballs. The snowflakes didn’t feel as sharp as I imagined. They just felt like cold water. I blinked and let them drip onto my cheeks. I had to accept that the storm would keep storming until it was over. And when I got to the bus stop, the bus would come or it wouldn’t. There would be reasons for whatever happened just as there must have been reasons for the mutt in the road. But, I might never know them. And they wouldn’t necessarily mean that any of it made sense.