Old fogeys and nice bank tellers

Old fogeys just don't have a clue about the goings on of the younger generations. That's a good thing because we can live languorously in our neat little homes with sheeny floors and the counter tops all spic and span. We can sit in the arm chair and read our morning paper with no distractions from those vexatious ring tones, our phone hanging on the wall still having that little bell that dingles just right. Life is good with a bowl of corn flakes in the morning and some toast and a good cup of coffee to wash it down. We don't have a clue what Taylor Swift or Eminem sound like and that's the way we like it. Our kids are all grown up and they're too smart for our advice anyhow and their little rug rats find us boring so we don't have to sanitize after their invasions too often, them being catechized in the precariousness of nature unless it's commingled in a plastic case.

Having been born way back when the phone was a party line and the biffy was outside down the hill and you canned your veggies for the coming winter, we kind of gave up on keeping up with novelizations after about the tenth wave came along. The automatic transmission was about as fancy as we could handle life. So with all due respect, you can stick your iPhones where the sun don't shine. We can walk hand in hand down the garden path chuckling at that red breasted robin pulling a six inch worm out of the manicured lawn. They've been around way longer than us and probably view us as an interesting upstart.

That's a bit of background to the encounter we had at the bank the other day, the place we go to get a bit of cash for places that don't take cheques. It seemed like if we wanted cash we now needed our bank card. Well. We'd had this account for forty five years and never ran into this triviality before. Apparently we were to have gotten one when we opened our account. Right, so we wafted through our stack of little papers nestled in our wallet which hadn't been looked at for nigh on twenty years and low and behold there it was, a little tattered and faded, but we proudly displayed the still legible neatly hand written account number. The nice teller, she looked at the card and then she looked at us and then she looked at the card again and then she looked at us again and if we hadn't been all smiling just pleased with ourselves for finding our bank card we believe she would have called security.

We came home and showed our wife the new plastic bank card that the nice teller had given us and our wife was highly impressed. It would probably last longer than the forty five years the old one did, and it works swell for sorting our pills when we put them in their weekly containers. And for the secret number I told her just remember “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” and we both agreed that we could remember that even under the duress of recall in the bank line.

Yep, old fogeys they tend to exaggerate a mite once in a while, but then when your a livin' in an incomprehensible world a little tomfoolery is good for the soul. Keeps the young ones on their toes, especially the nice bank tellers.