Uncivilized Society
By E. Noel Preston, MD

   This afternoon I went through the drive-in at my bank to make a deposit. There were three cars in each of the two lanes in front, and I had to choose which lane to enter. Nobody was behind me, so I sort of halfway straddled the line until I could see which one might move faster. The front car in the left lane, the one closer to the bank building, pulled away, so now I became the third car in the left lane. Surprisingly, the new front car in my lane moved on in a very short time, and now I was the second car in my lane. In the meantime, none of the cars in the other lane had moved at all.

   The man driving the second car in the other lane got out of his car and stormed up to the drive-in teller's window. He threw out his arms and stamped his foot. "What in the world is taking so long?" he demanded. "I've been sitting in this lane for 20 minutes and nothing's happening! Four or five cars have gone by in the other lane while I've been here, I've burned up nearly a quarter of a tank of gas waiting in line, and we haven't moved at all! Can't you speed things up, or is this such a complicated transaction you should be doing this inside instead of out here anyway?"

   The teller, who is a very nice woman I know from the choir where I used to go to church, said, "Sir, we are almost finished, but it will take a little more time. Why don't you park your car and come inside and we'll move you to the head of the line so you won't have to wait any longer?" The man said, "I can't move my car: there are four or five cars behind me! Since you can't move them back, can't you move this one out of here so she," he said, pointing at the driver of the car in front, "can go inside, and then we'll both be at the head of the line?

   The front car in the other lane was brand new and had a Louisiana license tag. The woman driving it told the man, "We're going as fast as we can, but I'm getting $5,000 in cash and it's taking a while for them to get it." The man stomped back to his car, got in, and slammed the door. By this time both lanes were backed up the whole length of the parking lot. A woman wearing a white ribbon pinned to her suit came out from the bank and approached the woman with the Louisiana license tag. "I'm sorry, ma'am," she said, "but you will need to come inside to finish your transaction. This is taking too long and we have other customers who are being inconvenienced by having to wait."

   "No, I'm not coming inside," said the woman from Louisiana. "We're almost finished, and if I come inside we'll have to start all over again, and I'm not giving up my space. I'm staying right here until we're all done." The woman in the suit with the ribbon went back to the man in the next car and apologized. "I'm sorry, sir, but I can't force her to move. She's almost finished, and then you'll be next." The man snorted and rolled up his car window without saying anything. 

   And so, how could all of this aggravation have been avoided? There might have been a sign at the drive-in window that said, "Please come inside for cash or commercial transactions." My friend the teller might have said, "I'm sorry, but we can't dispense more than $500 in cash through the drive-in window." The woman from Louisiana might have wanted to be inside anyway so she could watch every single bill of her $5,000 being counted. And you know she would have wanted to stay right there in line to count her money before driving away. And the bank might have designed a drive-in with only one lane, so that the driver at the head of the line could choose which teller window to approach without having to gamble on which lane to choose.

   I told this story to my friend Jack, and was surprised when he said it proves his theory that executive compensation and failure to enforce antitrust laws are contributing to the downfall of America. He said executives hire "consultants" to recommend what those same executives should be paid, and then those executives pay their own employees barely a living wage. I have patients whose parents are bank tellers, and their families are on Medicaid! Yes, the bank provides health insurance, but with a $1,000 a year deductible for each person in the family, and the employee's salary is so low the children qualify for Medicaid! Imagine that! Bank tellers with children on Medicaid, which means the whole family's on food stamps! America, America, God shed His grace on thee!

   Banks and airline companies and drug store chains and grocery stores and department stores buy each other up and competition flies out the window. Health insurance companies pay their CEO's hundreds of millions of dollars a year as salaries, and then obscene bonuses on top of that, while charging the public higher premiums for less coverage -- and then they pay the doctors less now than they did ten years ago. Target and Wal-Mart and Costco are driving the mom and pop stores out of business. They buy their goods from China, and Thomas Edison, the guy who invented the light bulb, is revolving in his grave because General Electric, the company he founded, is getting out of the light bulb business! American workers are losing their jobs. The middle class is disappearing, the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" is getting bigger, and people are just getting mean to each other. 

   My marvelous little bank, where I've been a customer since 1979, has been bought by one of the bullies from North Carolina. And the bigger bank doesn't really care if I have to stand in line to put my money in their bank while three bank officers, who could be waiting on customers, are on the phone or typing at a keyboard. It doesn't care what you think if the grace period for paying a credit card bill without getting a late fee or a finance charge goes from 30 days down to 14 days. It doesn't care if you would rather have your actual canceled checks instead of just photocopies. And it doesn't care if you burn up a quarter tank of $3 a gallon gas just waiting to get to the drive-in window. It doesn't care because it knows you don't have a choice: if you change to another bank it won't be any different. But what do you expect of a bank named Walk Ova Yuh?

   I think I liked the last century better. At least people were nicer.

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E. Noel Preston, M.D. is a pediatrician in solo practice in Peachtree Corners. 6063 Peachtree Parkway, Suite 202-A, Norcross. (770) 448-1553. More information can be found at www.PeachtreeCornersPediatrics.com

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