Union Bank

I went to Union Bank on Friday to make a cash lodgment for my buddy. But when I got to the entrance, it almost looked like the bank was handing out free #1000 bills cos of the crowd at the bank's entrance. I didn't bother finding out what the fuss was all about, so I walked straight in to the banking hall for serious business.

At the entrance, I noticed this wall plaque that read:

Our Mission:

To be the foremost financial institution with the most satisfied customers

Our Vision

"To be the best of the best to bank on"

OF COURSE! What bank wouldn't want to be ALL that? This was at the Abuja main branch in Garki. As I stepped into the hall proper, the air conditioner couldn't contain the height of CO2 in that place men. It was so humid in there with all sorts of ppl: sweating, pregnant, tired, snoozing, chatting, standing, moping, you name it. I asked for the deposit slip and some guys standing beside the counter started laughing at me. I couldn't tell why. Thinking about it, since it was the end of the month, I felt the crowd I saw were mostly people who came in for withdrawals. So they probably were laughing at me for thinking I could get stuff done and leave asap. It was sort of related, as I eventually found out.

I walked over to the counter and looked at the worn out lady behind the counter:

Me: Good afternoon. Please, I need to make a deposit...
Woman: *sighs* Join that queue...(she lazily threw her arm to my left so I could see for myself)
Me: You mean, all these people are waiting to make some sort of payments? I thought they are only here for withdrawals O

The woman just ignored me. The group of men that were laughing earlier started again after they heard her response. This time, i got sorta furious, but I didn't show it. This is me, leaving some things unattended thinking I could just dash in and out of the bank, but see me o! I managed to speak to some guy with a better countenance who told me he's been coming back and forth the bank for the past four days without being able to get access to his account. Mind you, this was Friday. It was the end of the month, salaries tied in their different accounts and people needed to get some cash baaadly. I now understood why there were so many people loitering outside the bank. Just as we finished talking, one man was shouting at the top of his voice, down the banking hall...

"What rubbish?! This is nonsense. You people make me come here to pay in my money and now it's time to get it out, it's wahala? WHat nonsense! What sort of rubbish is this?"

I left that branch and thought I could be fast and use another branch, but same story. They even referred me back to where I was coming from. WHY ALL THESE? SO yeah, long story short, the bank was upgrading their "systems". That's the mantra the staff kept dishing out that day and I'd bet the previous days.

Human errors, we've got to give them the benefit of the doubt. We can not be sure of 100% up time in business and all that. But why couldn't the server (or whatever they were doing) be migrated over the weekend, say starting late after work hours on Friday and then the I.T. department be made to work in earnest, ensuring everything is up latest Tuesday? This was at a very sensitive period and people are made to suffer like this. Whatever happened to banking with ease, with all the technology available these days? Heck, even some ATM machines are broken and they are usually "temporarily out of service" for weeks if not months. It's really bad and as I speak, Union Bank is still not operating. They even have a message on their web site greeting you with an apology.

As I walked out of the bank, I read another sign on the building...

UNION BANK PLC..

BIG, STRONG, RELIABLE.

Reliable...indeed.

Misc:

I'll leave you all with Helga's satire of the current move by the US to be more environmentally responsible. I know it's a weird web site AND post, but humor me!

Warning: Might be insulting, proceed with caution: For those with my weird sense of humor, enjoy! :)

----------------------------------------------------------------
Hallow Noble Savages,

I am Helga Mohammed el-Salami, Liquid Generation’s gas-guzzling (and emitting) uncircumcised, pre-operative transsexual and I am pissed as poo about the greening of America. Now that the celebrities are on the Global Warming kick along with their robotic spokesmodel, all you neophyte environmentalists have replaced your light bulbs, bought Priuses and started turning down your air conditioning. Congratulations. I hope you dislocate your shoulder patting yourselves on the back. Judging by the continued success of Inconvenient Truth, panic sells better than sex.

So after you’ve gotten bark-burn from hugging all those trees, go home, take a shower, shave your armpits, and listen up: you’re all blithering idiots. I can’t wait until the day I don’t have to listen to your preaching any more and whining about my gas-guzzling fleet. Green this, green that. Unless you’re talking about green beer, you can all kiss by big...black...Hummer.

When was the last time you heard any whining about CFCs? DDT? The Ozone hole? Indeed, you will be hard pressed to hear any of the panic mongering from the last century. I know all the pot-smoking really harms the short-term memory but let’s have a refresher.

In 1906, Upton Sinclair waxed tragic about the state of the meatpacking business in the US. So after I cried for Jurgis Rudkus, I went out and fed my sorrow a delicious cheeseburger that likely contained 1x10-5 parts feces rodentia. And you know what? It tasted absolutely the same as the last time when it might have contained 1x10-3. Figure that if you eat a burger 3 times a week for 20 years, you will, at some point, dine on of 1x10-12345 parts Jurgis’ finger (although now it’ll more likely be Juan’s). Yet, despite all the rats and cannibalism and oppression of young immigrants, you’ll still be bitching about your blood sugar at an average 77.85 years of age.

In 1962, Rachel Carson launched a thorough and successful assault on pesticides commonly used in agriculture with her comedy masterpiece: Silent Spring. After nearly 45 years, DDT is no longer used. Every organism on the planet has what was once considered a lethal quantity of it in its cells and the human ones are still alive to bitch about the worms in their raspberries.

My favorite: 1968, Paul Ehrlich prophesized in The Population Bomb that by 2050, there’d be so many of us that we’ll all be living in a 2000 story skyscraper that covered every inch of the earth. Construction challenges facing such a structure would limit socializing to those several floors away. We have some time before 2050 but let’s not pour concrete in our swimming pools quite yet.

And finally, in 2005, the esteemed Jared Diamond, author of one of the most insightful and profound books of the previous decade: Guns Germs and Steel, tried to break the wave of his success on Collapse, a book about the failure of societies due to a laundry-list of (mostly environmental) issues. It’s too soon to render a verdict on the bearded Professor since he wisely chose topics which cannot be gauged within a human lifetime but the book itself was a real steaming pile of environmental compost. I can’t resist quoting Fred L. Smith Jr Competitive Enterprise Institute: "[a] jumble of jigsaw puzzle pieces laid out on the table - no structure, no serious organization." Indeed, I was so pissed after reading this book that I wanted to rip out all 592 pages and use every single one to give the author paper cuts between his toes. Then set him out barefoot on the New Guinea lowlands about which he can’t seem to shut the flock up. But this isn’t a book review and I digress because I’m getting all worked up again so I’m going to end this paragraph prematurely: *SPURT*

Now then, I bet you couldn’t identify a single one of these panic prophets if I held an ozone hole over your head. You can identify Gore because he was once the Secretary of Vice Presidency or something like that. What’s the point of my incessant mockery? That we will survive. We survived before and will again. And if we don’t, if the polar ice caps melt and the oceanic currents stop, and if the ocean washes inland a further 500 miles then at least we’ll prove Paul Ehrlich decisively wrong by dying en masse! And then we’ll prove my real-estate agent decisively right by increasing Chicago property value. Then we’ll have a surviving world with a much higher average IQ without LA or the Middle East to drag it down. Even though the fish that take up residence in the former will be pretty while those in the latter will likely make their females swim behind them.

Print that out and paint it Red # 5.

Helga Mohammed el-Salami

[If you’d like to read more of Helga’s angry ramblings, please go to his/her website right now before he/she finds you, and eats/sheats you for dinner