Charge of the Tight Brigade

My personal banker looks over the paperwork which he has extracted from the printer one more time and smiles a slightly oily smile.
“Well everything seems to be in order.” He tells me.
He has a name of course, but I forget it. Like many in his profession, the actual name seems now to take second place to the ingratiating smile, the firm handshake and the pristine suit. That his name is printed on the office door, on a small plaque on the desk itself and on each of the business cards, a stack of which he shuffles impatiently as he waits for me to fill out the paperwork he had set before me, might suggest that he has a tendency to forget it himself.
He scans the paperwork once more, then holds it in his hands and bounces it on the desk-top to align the pages and scoots it across the polished desktop towards me, dotted line first. A pen glints beside it insomuch as a fifty-cent ballpoint pen can glint.
“So,” he says, businesslike, “To summarize, the FlexiAccount is a current account, mainly electronic. You’ll get a card… everything else will be online, okay?”
“Okay.”
“The account has a five dollar base fee…”
“I’m sorry, a what?”
“A base fee.” He smiles again with movie-star teeth, “Each month we charge five dollars, unless you have over two and half thousand in your account.”
“You’re renting me an account?”
“Well if you were under thirty, it would be free.”
The temperature in the room drops a little. At least I hope it does, in fact I feel it certainly should but my personal banker’s professional warmth (I suspect he has a certificate in the subject) keeps the atmosphere more pleasant than it deserves and he remains almost totally oblivious. It suddenly dawns on me that were he in my position, he would probably qualify for the free account, and so I glower at him instead in a sort of inoffensive I-still-want-an-account sort of way.
This at least achieves the desired effect. His eyes widen a little and he attempts to make things sound more positive.
“But the best thing,” he says, “Is that with this account, your first thirty transactions are absolutely free each month.”
I frown.
“Transactions?” I ask turning the paperwork back to me to try and find some smaller print which I might have overlooked.
He nods enthusiastically, pleased to have got my attention at last.
“Sure,” he says, “Withdrawals, card purchases, that sort of thing.”
“Absolutely free?”
“Absolutely. Unless you use our competitors bank machines of course. Then you’ll be charged by us … and probably by them too. But there are so many of our machines that you’ll never need to go anywhere else and…”
I stop him, something just doesn’t seem right here.
“So after I’ve made thirty purchases or used the ATM machines or both, then you’ll start charging me to access my own money from my own bank account which you’re already charging me rent on?”
A small pause follows.
“The first thirty transactions are free.” He says again defensively.
The scary thing is that this selling point really is genuine for this particular bank. All its competitors charge regardless whenever you do absolutely anything with your account. So much so, in fact, that were I not living from hostel to hostel, I would seriously consider investing in a new mattress to sew my earnings into.
As it is, my employment agency needs a local bank account to direct any funds into, should I earn any, and so it would appear that in terms of local banking, I am between a rock and hard place – only with thirty free transactions to play with.
I sign my name on the dotted line and the banker snatches it off me and appears to be satisfied. He gives me an account number scrawled in ball-point pen on the top of a leaflet detailing the various bank charges (and illustrated with a pair of smiling people who presumably haven’t read the booklet yet). I refrain from observing that it seems to cost an awful lot to save money here and instead shake the hand which he has extended across his desk enthusiastically to me.
“I haven’t been charged for this consultation, have I?” I ask him before I leave.
He blinks.
“Of course not.” He says and laughs uproariously as though the idea is either preposterous or brilliant.