Bank Note

In September 2001, as I was beginning my second year of university, I closed my accounts with the First National Bank of Albion and opened new ones with a major multinational in downtown Lincoln, Nebraska. In those early days of online banking, when cheques were still physical and deposited in person, it made more sense to locate my affairs just blocks from my apartment rather than hours down the road.

It was an in-person transaction that took me to the branch one afternoon weeks later, as I made my way to cross-country practice. I filled out the deposit slip for a cheque of some modest amount, queued for a teller, and accepted the receipt with my balance. It was all routine until I noticed something as I headed toward the door: I had over $10 million in savings.

I did well as an undergraduate, with scholarships that covered my tuition and books and living expenses. But I didn’t do that well. I returned to the teller to flag the obvious: there had been some sort of mix‑up. I’ll never forget how she replied: “We don’t make that kind of mistake.” I should have thanked her for her time, skipped practice for the rest of the season, and headed straight to the airport. Instead, I insisted that the tidy fortune wasn’t mine — to her, to the two or three other tellers she eventually consulted, and to the confused branch manager who ultimately led me to his office.

Phone calls were made. Questions were asked. I worried that I’d be late for practice. Finally, the culprit was found: a clerical error that could have changed my life, if only I’d been quicker on my feet. When I had opened my new chequing and savings accounts, I had asked for $50 from the former to be automatically deposited into the latter on the first of every month. It turned out that the bank employee who keyed everything into the system had entered not the amount to be transferred but the date on which the first transfer should happen: 10012001. What nobody could explain was why my chequing account — which had the funds you might expect of a nineteen-year-old — was not debited and sent into serious overdraft.

Suffice to say, the bank kindly took the money back. In the blink of an eye, I was once again borderline broke. I left the branch without so much as a lollipop, got into my car, and drove to practice, where I told my teammates what had just happened. It was, without a doubt, one of the most anticlimactic afternoons of my life.

I couldn’t help but think of that long-ago day when I read about Pope Leo XIV and his own Midwestern account. As the New York Times reported in May, the former Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost called his bank shortly after he was made the bishop of Rome, in order to change the phone number and address on his file. Although he answered various security questions correctly, the representative insisted that he would need to visit a branch in person. “I’m not going to be able to do that,” he reportedly explained. She maintained that was the only way to update his paperwork. “Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?” he asked her. She hung up.

Whether twenty-five years ago or last week, in person or over the phone, customer service interactions are rarely perfect. Take a number and wait. Please hold. A representative will be with you in an estimated twenty-three minutes. But there’s a levelling effect at play when we try to get someone at FedEx, the CRA, 311, or the bank to help us navigate an opaque process or register a complaint or update an address. It doesn’t matter if you’re a pontiff or a pauper; you’re going to be inconvenienced from time to time. On occasion, though, you may also walk away with an anecdote worth sharing at dinner parties.

Singular experiences like mine (or the Pope’s) seem less likely as the other end of the line or other side of the desk is increasingly automated, as support roles are replaced by chatbots, and as call centres — from Moncton to Manila — are all given the same generic accent by telecom giants using “AI-powered speech enhancement” technologies. “These models directly modify the acoustic features of speech, preserving the speaker’s voice while improving clarity and reducing accent-related friction,” Telus Digital noted on its website last summer, when it announced a partnership with Tomato.ai (the same partnership that is now making headlines). While unions are rightly concerned that such models may one day threaten jobs, we already know they threaten the texture that makes the world an authentically human place. “Speech enhancement technology can create a virtuous cycle for customer service agents,” Telus Digital insists. But at what cost?

The cost for me all those years ago was thirty or forty minutes of my time and $10,012,001. Yet there was redress when I received my statement at the end of the month. Those confused keystrokes had generated thousands in interest, which I got to keep, along with a rich story.