Lunch in the Bank

One of the main benefits of being a comedian is the ability to do things in your own time. Going to the shops when you please. Being able to post that letter at a time that is convenient to you. Whilst this is a benefit for someone who works odd hours, mostly in the evenings, it isn’t just comedians who can use these services all hours of the day. The 10am trip to the post office is also the time that another group of social outcasts also like to go to the post office. For the remainder of this post I shall refer to these people as ‘scum’.

We all know a sub-group of society that we may refer to as scum, bankers, real-estate agents, personal injury lawyers, et al. These ‘scum’ are the unemployed leaches that stalk the daytime like vampires unafraid of the sun.

I am not saying that all unemployed people are scum. The scum I refer to are a specific subset of the unemployed and you know who you are. They are not ‘in-between jobs’, they have long since given up finding that next job and many never had a job in the first place. They are unclean, poorly dressed; often smelly, shunned and ignored by the working people… they are essentially comedians without the gigs in the evenings.

With the exception of the short snippets of footage they see on the evening current affair programs the working people of the world don’t really encounter the scum in their day-to-day life. The employed people quickly duck into the bank in their one hour of break at lunchtime, they then complain loudly about how busy it is, but lunchtime is when the unemployed scum know not to go to the bank so again their paths do not cross.

I however am less organised than the scum so I recently found myself in the bank at the same time as the working people. I think every one of them either sighed, tutted or loudly voiced a complaint about how few tellers there were and how slow the ones who were there were working.

I have been to the bank with the scum and I have been there with the working people and let me clear a few things up. The banks do have too few people manning the tellers at lunchtime and the banking experience would be much more pleasurable if the tellers were quicker at their jobs. But trust me when I say: the lunchtime employee is without a doubt the best employee that the banks have to offer. Lunchtime, believe it or not, is when the banks play their A team. The A team may not always bring their A game but what you see is as good as they’re going to get.

Sure they don’t always smile when they serve you and they may seem unmotivated but, working people, this is for you, don’t complain! These people work in a bank, which I’m sure wasn’t how they hoped their life would work out, and with the exception of the 1 hour ‘lunch time crowd’ they spend the remaining 7 hours of their working day dealing with the scum. You don’t deal with them. They do.

With my own eyes I have witnessed bank staff threatened with violence because they had to inform the scummiest of the scum that if you don’t repay your credit card you can’t buy another 50’ LCD TV with it. They bring their children into the bank with them and they display examples of bad parenting that will eventually lead to the state legislating against their right to breed.

But despite all of their flaws, if I was a bank teller, I would prefer to serve the scum than you, the employed people. You have a sense of superiority towards the bank staff which, although possibly justified, is just downright rude. They didn’t personally wrong you. They don’t want to have to ask you if you would like to speak to someone about your savings accounts. They have targets to meet and a boss who cares less about them than they care about you. If you look closely you can see that it upsets them that you have any money and they clearly spend their time staring at your face while desperately fighting the urge to delete all record of your accounts from the computer.

So in summation:

Working people – try to be nice. You don’t have to be super nice but at the very least be understanding and patient.

Scum – do what you want, you may as well.

Comedians – be more organised and avoid the lunchtime crowd, just play video games for an extra hour and go to the bank in the afternoon.