By Louis Muiruri
There are very few things out of which I do not derive a certain amount of amusement. Visiting a banking hall for the first time stands proudly atop the list of the things that really excited me.
I had just received my students allowance when I joined an institution of higher learning where I can bet that half of the things l learned will probably never be useful in my life.
Until then, my only interaction with a bank was only during end month when teachers were paid. My mother being a teacher treated her monthly bank visit with a sense of humility and reverence that I really admired. I always looked forward to my first direct encounter with a banking institution.
The other remote relationship I had with a bank was a man whom we shared the same river and cattle dip. He happened to be an employee of a bank in the local branch. We always knew him for his heavily starched woolen suits, impeccable mannerism and his taste for the finer things in life. He always dropped his children to school and to church, something that we only saw on the television.
Because I did not intend to dilute the standards set by my mother and my neighbour in the banking industry during my maiden banking hall visit, I donned a mix and match suit and polished my shoes until they blinded oncoming cars.
I also carried three pens of different colours in the front pocket of my shirt because I had seen my grandfather do the same. In order to make the pocket look more prosperous, I stuffed a few more papers into the pocket. I had this notion that papers carried with them a sense of worth and importance. Needless to say, the papers included receipts from the cattle dip, user manuals from the knapsack sprayer and material safety data sheets from a pesticide.
I sauntered into the banking hall with a false sense of importance and self worth because I did not intend to feel small in the wake of the serious investors and tax payers who filled the banking hall.
I joined what I thought was a reasonably short queue to the counter. I was glad that I was going to be served in the next few minutes, or the next five or so customers ahead of me whichever came first. However my apparent relief was short lived. A mean looking guard tapped my shoulder and even without uttering a word, he indicated to me that I should be respectful of other people behind me who had been in the queue for the better part of the morning. That is when it dawned on me that I had just cut the queue where it curved a corner, while in the real sense the queue had extended and coiled itself inside the banking hall about three times.
I humbly took my position at the tail of the queue. Halfway through the queue I realized that everyone was holding onto a piece of paper, and it drained my curiosity before I learnt that I was supposed to fill a banking slip before I reached the cashier.
As I spent the next few hours of my life waiting for the queue to move, I could not help but notice that despite there being more than ten counters, only three were occupied by cashiers. Out of the three, one of them seemed to have been involved in a single transaction that threatened to take the whole day. That left us with just two cashiers whose levels of efficiency was a case study for self motivation.
Finally my turn came to be served. The level of mistrust those days must have been an all time high. Apart from the national identification card, it was at the discretion of the casher to request for other forms of identification including a letter of introduction from your local sub chief and a signed alibi from your pastor.
Being an analogue era, the cashiers took another precious part of your life perusing through manual records in order to verify your identity and net worth in their books. You were also required to append a number of signatures at the bottom of several documents before the cashier was convinced enough to part with your money.
It was a glad reunion between me and my money when the cashier finally parted the partition glass and handed me a wad of crisp notes that I swiftly stuffed into my socks and inner pockets.
For those of you who just dawned upon the current pleasant looking banking halls where a cooing voice graciously invites your number to proceed and get served by a benevolent looking cashier, you have not experienced a banking hall in its full grandeur.