It’s 8 AM, Saturday morning. Like any normal person who isn’t a baker or a truck driver or some sort of half-crazed magician who practices obsessively for as many as 18 hours a day, you’re still asleep. Rapidly, however, you find yourself woken by a muffled but loud noise. The noise repeats itself over and over again, making it impossible to sleep.
It is apparently a sound check1, at eight in the damned morning on a Saturday. At this point, if you are a religious person, you have two options. You can demand that your god strike down these evildoers with great speed and fiery vengeance. Alternately, you can renounce your faith. Either way, you’re awake now, and on a sour note.
This was my Saturday, as the bank in the shopping plaza next door decided to celebrate their grand opening with a carnival. Read that again – a bank decided to celebrate their opening with a carnival. That is truly bizarre.
This is the same TD Bank who, in December of 2009 while still under construction, put up a sign stating “Open 7 Days A Week”. Almost three months later, in February of 2010, the bank finally opened its doors to customers. However, that was apparently some sort of “soft opening”, because after another three months, they had their official “Grand Opening”. Again, this is all for a bank, one with hundreds of branches already open.
All this led to a revelation: TD Bank has no concept of time.
With no concept of time, TD Bank decided to have the band for their carnival do a sound check at 8 AM. They also decided to have their carnival begin at just an hour later. Attendance for the first three hours was predictably sparse. No one wants a hot dog from the free hot dog cart at 9 in the morning, because that is disgusting. Their “Additional parking at subway station – Shuttle service provided!” sign was laughably optimistic. For a time, there were more men on stilts juggling bowling pins (1) than attendees (0).
Eventually, attendees outnumbered employees of the bank, but it was still close. While this can largely be attributed to the fact that, yet again, this was a carnival for the opening of a freaking bank, it’s possible potential attendees got lost. You see, TD Bank also has no concept of space.
This is the invitation they sent out, listing the address as “Alewife Brook Parkway & Lakeview Avenue”. Now have a look at a map of the area. Lake View Avenue (not “Lakeview”) doesn’t actually intersect with Alewife Brook Parkway at all. The point where it comes the closest to doing so is, as the crow flies, over a third of a mile off from the bank’s location. Driving, that distance is more like half a mile away. That’s…not close.
I’ve never used TD Bank. Perhaps they provide fantastic service. Maybe they have the most delicious lollipops. Until they get a few physics lessons to learn about time and space, however, customers should be awfully worried about just how many days their checks will take to clear.
Footnotes:
In fact, it was probably the most annoying soundcheck I’ve ever heard and I wish I’d been awake enough to get a recording. What you hear is an attempt at a recreation, from the memory which haunts my brain. ↩︎
