I Hate Banks, I Love Travel

My body has no idea what time it is this side of the world

Here's a little sidestory. I had an 8 hour layover in London, on my way to Poland. When I'd arrived in London Heathrow after 32 hours of travel, 3 flights and 4 different countries I decided what better way to spend my 8 hour connection than by visiting a bank! As some of you may know, i'd been in a wrestling match with my UK bank since December about funds that had 'gone missing'. I'd tried to transfer money to Canada only to have it dissapear somewhere enroute. These hassles continued over 2 months as I called and called and got no help and finally decided that it'd be easier to just rob the bank.

With that in mind I decided to take a trip into town from the airport and face-off with the bank officials in person. Here's a picture of me looking overly-optimisitic as I wait for someone to help me. Little did I know that I'd be in for a three hour fiasco of stress and confusion. Little did they know that I hadn't showered for over two days and was still wearing the same underwear and socks as I had been over 20,000km ago. I'm sure they did notice that with little or no sleep under my belt from two days of travel I was pretty irritable, making no sense while talking and having trouble not drooling on myself.

It was funny, in a way (a small way). I just came into the bank, and told them to cancel everything and give me my money. How hard could that be? Very. Calls were made, files were drawn up, accounts were given and at one point I was even told to go to Weymouth and get it. Excuse me? Do we live in the middle ages? Can you not transfer these funds somehow or do I need to take my mule down to Dorset and bring my gold bullion back in large brown potato sacks?

The best part for me was scanning through my file history with the bank and seeing notes that had been made on it over the past few weeks. Example:

Feb 16 - Please phone client ASAP, urgent request for explanation
Feb 18 - CLient phoned again, demanding payments and unsure of situation
Feb 20 - Client irritable and demanding phone call before his cell phone is turned off
Feb 21 - Client extremely vulgar and personally offensive, making remarks about my weight and status of my marriage. Please advise

Maybe not the last one, but at some point I think that people just stopped caring that I was calling every day. Here's once such person on the phone, enduring my fury and my camera

Happy ending though, I stayed much longer than I wanted to, excalated the situation to some higher ups and got my money in hand with 4 hours to go before my poland flight. Then, with a large lump of cash in my backpack along with all of my personal belongings, I ran back to the tube, took a train to Heathrow, found a bus to Luton, sat through incredible traffic jams and made my flight with 45 minutes to spare! Here's a photo of me on the subway back to the airport, stressed about time