Your Least Fun Hour

Illustration: David Lee Ingersoll

Think about your most fun hour. Nothing sordid, please. Perhaps it was an afternoon at an amusement park where the rides were awesome and you didn't have to wait in any lines. Maybe it was a puppet show where you had a front-row seat and spent the hour in pure, child-like ecstasy.Hold onto that hour. Let it be your anchor!Now reverse it. Turn it onto its head. Using this definition of fun, steel yourself for an hour of fun's opposite.You are now ready to arrange for an international transfer at the customer service desk of a Taiwanese bank.The less said about your reason for requiring the transfer, the better. The idea that the simplicity of your request might somehow translate into a simple execution is best left at the door. Perhaps you need to re-route a deposit made in error to your Taiwanese account by an overworked Lonely Planet accountant in Oakland for pending work in Central America. Or maybe you're looking to exchange the balance of your new Taiwan dollar account into a combination of long-defunct East German marks and trillion-dollar Zimbabwe notes for clandestine funneling over to a bank in Kenya with only one branch and no phone, ostensibly to fund a zebra ranch.It doesn't matter, because the amount of surprise that Mrs. Cheng, the banker on duty, will express at the nature of the transaction — and the corresponding paperwork and stamping-will be exactly the same. She will stare at you for a long, unblinking minute as her mind slowly begins to travel down the vast labyrinth of complexity that fulfilling your request might entail.It is during this unblinking moment that you attempt to explain to Mrs. Cheng, in your most polished Mandarin, the exact nature of your request. An error has been made, you tell her with utmost patience. There is money in your Taiwanese account that will be inaccessible to you overseas, where you are headed on a flight in just twelve hours. You are hoping to have it transferred into your Hong Kong account, from where it will be accessible, and from where international transfers can be done online and without a note signed by your next of kin, your high school principal, the doctor who delivered you, and the rabbi who performed your circumcision.Mrs. Cheng will listen to you with knitted brow, sipping tea all the while from a white porcelain mug on which the Chinese characters ren shou ("endure") are etched. You must continue smiling as you explain yourself. It is imperative that you never, ever stop smiling. Remember this one rule, or your chances of leaving this bank with your transfer done are nil."So...you wish to return this money to the sender?" Mrs. Cheng says after a long pause. She does not quite understand you."No. I just want to transfer it into my overseas account.""Ah." Mrs. Cheng will now have another sip of tea. "There will be a fee.""Of course.""We will have to change the money from US dollars into Taiwan dollars, and then back again into US dollars.""Is that necessary?" you ask, regretting the question immediately. The look on Mrs. Cheng's face indicates that she too regrets your question, as it has opened up a whole new avenue of troublesome research down which she now must tread."Please wait."Mrs. Cheng will now stand up and walk to a small library, perusing stacks of binders for ten minutes before removing a large blue tome the size of a metropolitan phone book.  She will return to her desk with this and skim through it for a further ten minutes.You must keep smiling as she does this."Ah. According to the newest bank regulations, we do not need to transfer the money from US to Taiwan currency and then back to US dollars again. But you will have to authorize our not doing this.""Of course."Mrs. Cheng will now disappear for another ten minutes. When she returns, she will be carrying a stack of paper nearly equal in size to the phone-book tome of regulations."Can you write in Chinese?"You admit that you cannot, at least not well enough for the task at hand."I will fill out the forms for you."Mrs. Cheng will then proceed to fill out a lengthy series of legal documents which you can only assume are germane to the transaction at hand, but might, for all you know, grant the bank sole ownership of all of your assets, intellectual property and internal organs in the event of your death, or indeed, any time before."Sign here."Mrs. Cheng hands you the first of what promises to be many documents and points at a small box at the bottom big enough only for a typical 2"x2" Taiwanese name stamp.After you sign, Mrs. Cheng will study your signature closely, her face compressing as if in deep thought. She will then let out a quiet, troubling sigh.She will take the document and walk it over to a desk in the back of the office where sits a fellow bank worker. Mrs. Cheng will tap a few keystrokes on a computer as the pair studies both screen and document while pointing at the screen and making low hmmmnoises.After a few moments of this, Mrs. Cheng will return and sit down. After another sip of tea, she leans over and gives you some bad news."Your signature on this paper is slightly different from the signature you first used when opening your account."Mrs. Cheng is holding your passport in front of her. You've also brought your previous passport, a copy of which rests in the bank files that she's currently perusing. The name on the account to which you'd like to transfer money is the same as the one on the account in Taiwan at which Mrs. Cheng is currently employed. It is, in fact, the same name as the one on the three credit cards, the ATM card, the American driver's license, the birth certificate, the library card, and several other official documents you've brought along to prevent just such a misunderstanding like this.You may be tempted by the presence of this overwhelming mountain of evidence to point out that your identity cannot reasonably be called into question. Under no circumstances should you actually do this. Say nothing and continue smiling.Mrs. Cheng will remove the ceramic lid of her two-piece tea mug and have a quick sip of tea. She will then look to her left, then to her right, to make sure that the two of you are not being observed. Mrs. Cheng wants to help you. She wants to see this thing work for you. But there are regulations that need to be followed. Operational procedure must be obeyed.With the index finger of her left hand, Mrs. Cheng surreptitiously swivels the flat screen monitor on her desk just enough so that you, without having to crane your neck too obviously, can see the digital reproduction of your own signature, the original signature that you signed a dozen years back in this very building.Mrs. Cheng is correct. As a younger person, you looped the first "S" of your middle name. Yet somewhere along the road of life, that cheerful loop has become a sharp peak. You smile at Mrs. Cheng. She nods at you knowingly, and slides a second sheet of paper across the table.This you will sign on the spot indicated, reproducing as faithfully as possible the cheery S-loop of your youth.Mrs. Cheng examines the paper thoughtfully before reaching over to a cluttered corner of her desk for a box of wooden seals. She dabs the seal in red ink before stamping a box next to your signature. She then returns the seal to whence it came before retrieving a second one. This one is placed at the top of the page, the wooden seal returned to its slot in the box. Mrs. Cheng now slides another paper towards you.You repeat your end of the process, remembering the S-loop.Mrs. Cheng examines the paper thoughtfully before reaching over to a cluttered corner of her desk for a box of wooden seals. She dabs the seal in red ink before stamping a box next to your signature. She then returns the seal to whence it came before retrieving a second one. This one is placed at the top of the page, the wooden seal returned to its slot in the box. Mrs. Cheng now slides another paper towards you.You repeat your end of the process, remembering the S-loop.Mrs. Cheng examines the paper thoughtfully before reaching over to a cluttered corner of her desk for a box of wooden seals. She dabs the seal in red ink before stamping a box next to your signature. She then returns the seal to whence it came before retrieving a second one. This one is placed at the top of the page, the wooden seal returned to its slot in the box. Mrs. Cheng now slides another paper towards you.   You repeat your end of the process, remembering the S-loop.This will go on six more times.Finally, Mrs. Cheng seems satisfied with the thickness of the stack that separates you from her. She places the papers in a small folder and bids you to wait for a few minutes before disappearing, with folder in hand, into a back room.If you are carrying tranquilizers, the time to take them has passed. While the actual waiting will only be between ten and twenty minutes, it will feel like the longest ten to twenty minutes of your life.You may be tempted to fill your time by reading a magazine or by playing the Tetris knock-off that came with your mobile phone. Do not do this! This will be interpreted as a sign that you are not taking the process seriously, and even at this stage in the game could spell doom, or at least seriously delay the transfer.Mrs. Cheng is taking the process seriously. She is in the back room right now, very possibly using oracle bones and an abacus to communicate with a Ming-dynasty banking sage to discern the exact and correct method for facilitating this very complex banking procedure, the electronic transferring of a sum of money between two banks, one of which has the poor fortune of not being in Taiwan.The reverse of this process  — the transfer of money from a bank not in Taiwan to this bank in Taiwan, the bank in which you now find yourself sitting, forced smile frozen-likely took 90 seconds and was accomplished with two mouse clicks.Contemplate not this irrelevancy. Continue maintaining reverence. Continue smiling.Mrs. Cheng will return. It will seem like it's been an eternity, but in fact it's only been fifteen minutes. She will no longer have the stack of papers in her hand. Instead, she will have only three thin sheets, which she will present to you."These are your receipts. The transfer will take between one and three business days."You sit there, unable to believe that the process is at an end. Mrs. Cheng removes the lid from her two-piece tea mug and takes a sip."Is there anything else I can help you with?"There isn't. You thank her profusely for her efforts on your behalf, standing up to discover your legs have fallen asleep. Ambling towards the front door, your eyes blink in the bright sunshine. Another adventure in Taiwanese banking is at an end. You have now but to wait for the message to come from the bank on the other end that the transfer has gone through.This message actually arrives less than 24 hours later, via email, and with total efficiency and clarity. You may now stop smiling. Nobody is watching.

"Your Least Fun Hour" is one of nineteen Tales of Travel Madness from How Not to Avoid Jet Lag, illustrated by David Lee Ingersoll and available for Kindle at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P3BWGYY) and  all other E-formats at Smashwords (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...). Go buy it!
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