So, after rolling all the coins we decided to put them in the wife’s bank account. I gathered the rolls up and headed out the door.
After a short drive to the bank, I entered only to find a line of five other people ahead of me waiting to get to the tellers. I got at the end of the line and waited.
I finally get to the teller and tell her that I need to make a deposit. I have to pass the rolls of coins under the little dividing window one at a time. It’d be nice if there was a way to pass them all to the teller at once.
The teller is also working the drive thru window, so she takes my rolls of coins and my ID and the debit card for my wife’s account. She goes back to the drive thru window, handles something for someone waiting there, then starts working on making my deposit. After a moment, she comes back to me with the rolls of coins.
“James, are you listed on this account?”
“No, it’s my wife’s account.”
“Well, I can’t deposit cash into your wife’s account. There are regulations against it to prevent money laundering.”
“Gee, you’ve foiled me nefarious plan to finance my criminal empire with spare change.”
At least I got a smile from her. Making jokes in a bank is always a risky prospect, as usually they don’t have a sense of humor and you risk the teller calling security on you.
In related wisdom, there is the old adage “Do something unexpected every day. Unless you’re in a bank.”
The teller says that if my wife was outside and I could bring her in, or if not, the next time she came to the bank, the coins could be deposited then. Then she asks me to go to the other end of the counter, where they have a box with doors on each side, like an airlock, expressly for passing things back and forth to the teller. They couldn’t have used this the first time around?
On the whole, I’m not sure why the bank would care who deposits money into your account. I’m not a criminal so I’m not exactly sure how you would launder money by depositing it into someone else’s account, but hey, I’ll have to take the bank’s word for it. If someone is trying to withdraw money from my account, and it isn’t me, I want the bank to go to great lengths to verify that the person is allowed to take my money. Like, the person better have to sacrifice their first-born child if they want to take money out of my account.
But depositing? Let anyone who wants to put money in my account that wants to. Then the Ferengi First Rule of Acquisition comes into play.
“Once you have their money, never give it back.”
So, for now, my fledgling criminal empire has been stymied. I shall have to find another way to start it up using some spare change.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum
I have told bank tellers, when they keep asking for my id when I deposit what little money I have into my checking account, “if a complete stranger ever tries to deposit money into my account, LET THEM!” They would reply that the said stranger might then learn my account number. I said that if they are filling out a deposit slip, then they already know my account number. They would reply that they will also discover my account balance. I figure if they know how pitifully small my account balance is, they’ll realize I’m not worth the time and effort to try and steal from. Go figure.