Guichet Voisin - Adventures in banking

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In 1996, I moved from Vermont to Québec, bringing my freelance design business along with me.

My Québécois husband and I opened an account at the village branch of the local bank, which is technically a coöperative, the one you’ll find in nearly every Québec village. Each branch or “succursale” functions as a kind of small, independent business with its own hours, policies and quirks. At the time, the company slogan was that, in English, translating to “This is not a bank” – a statement that I came to agree with wholeheartedly.

So, we made an appointment. Despite the fact that our tiny town only has a population of about 1200 inhabitants, it was a week before we could be fit into their busy schedule. On the day of, we arrived and were politely ushered into a small office. We sat down face to face with the bank representative. She was very friendly, and after closing the door behind us and arranging some papers on her desk, she proceeded to light up a cigarette and puff away, filling the room with an uninterrupted cloud of smoke as she carefully explained the bank’s services to us. Eyes watering, trying not to cough for fear of appearing rude, we signed an endless pile of papers, grabbed our new cheque book and exited quickly, desperate for a gulp of fresh air.

The province of Québec banned workplace and restaurant smoking in May of 2006, more than ten years after my former place of residence, Vermont, put one of the first statewide bans in the U.S. into effect. Upon our arrival, I found it tough re-adapting to a smoking environment where people still regularly wanted to light up in my house. This put me in the awkward position of trying to maintain my hospitable newcomer status as I gently asked guests to please step outside to smoke. It took a few more years before they could also be convinced to deposit their cigarette butts into the old olive oil can provided for that purpose, rather than tossing them on the ground as they were our choice for a unique welcome mat.

Once the account was opened, I first visited the bank to exchange some U.S. dollars for the more useful (and attractive) Canadian variety, I went during my daily lunch break. And so did at least half the town. For what seemed an eternity, I waited in the long line of people who appeared stoically resigned to the wait. I had a lot of time to look around and noticed was that there were seven employees and four cashier windows. Three of the windows sported what looked like name cards, small, engraved plaques that stated “Guichet Voisin”. I was pondering this unusual name and the fact that there were three of them in the same bank branch. I didn’t find this entirely surprising in a place where it is common to find five pages of the local phonebook devoted to the same first and last names. You almost needed to know the phone number already in order to look it up. It finally dawned on me that the words on those plaques weren’t names at all, but in fact said “Next window”. Except for the teller at the one open window, the other employees carefully avoided direct eye contact with the people waiting in line (now down to a dozen), a tactic that has been mastered and perfected by overworked waitresses worldwide.

When I finally made it to the window, the fun really began. My French was far from perfect as I struggled to explain that I wanted to convert 100 U.S. dollars to Canadian currency. The bank teller looked confused, whether by my accent or by the transaction, I couldn’t be sure. She left me at the window to consult another teller. I could hear them going back and forth about whether they were buying or selling and what formula to apply. Finally, they figured out what had to be done, to the relief of the nine people now behind me who couldn’t help eavesdropping with obvious interest on the entire exchange due to the small space we all shared. It was shortly after this visit that I would hear one employee whisper to another “C’est “l’Anglaise” (It’s that English lady) upon entering the bank.

Like lots of people back in the day, we sometimes purchased American Express Traveler’s cheques before heading off on a a long trip anywhere. This was before everyone had a credit card – and even if you did have one, your credit card didn’t always function properly in other countries. These handy cheques could be used just like cash and were accepted nearly everywhere. I had a hundred dollars’ worth left over from a trip to Scotland and decided to cash them in at the bank. I waited in line and when it was my turn, the teller was already looking nervous. I explained that I wanted to cash my traveler’s cheques. She looked at them. Then she looked at me. She left me at the window to speak with the bank manager. When she came back, she explained to me that I would have to deposit them and that they would be cleared in thirty days. I tried, in my still-not-so-great French, to explain that they were like cash, there was no “clearing” of the cheque because they were from American Express, to whom I’d already paid their face value. Nope. Not happening.

PayPal had begun to come into popularity as an online payment method. Canada barely even had a mail-order industry and people here weren’t as credit-card-crazy as Americans, which resulted in their being a bit late to the game when it came to e-commerce. A lot of my website clients were still skeptical about online sales as a strategy. Accepting online payment terrified some of them, even though most payment fraud still occurs at physical locations, like when you hand someone your card in a restaurant or use it in an unknown machine that has been tampered with. I was already selling CDs online and really wanted to get paid at the moment of purchase rather than dealing with cheques, which took a long time to arrive and were often in U.S. dollars, meaning they wouldn’t clear my Canadian bank’s U.S. dollar savings account for a month. Even Canadian cheques would take a week or more. One of my family friends, who happened at the time to be president of one of Canada’s largest banks, assured me that no cheque in North America actually took longer than three days to clear. Sitting on a cheque was just a strategy for banks to earn extra interest off of customers’ deposits.

I followed the instructions on the PayPal website for adding my bank account. It explained that once I’d provided all the necessary details – account number, transit number, etc. PayPal would make two tiny deposits into my account and I could check the account activity to see when they cleared. Then I would log back in to PayPal to confirm the amounts of those two little deposits, a pretty clever proof-of-identity technique. If the amounts matched, it would mean that PayPal had successfully connected to my bank account. I spent a week checking bank transactions but nothing showed up, so I once again braved the line at the bank and asked the next available teller to confirm to me that the information I’d provided to PayPal was correct. What was PayPal? She had never heard of it and her expression told me that she couldn’t understand why I would want to connect my bank account to something as obviously questionable as the internet. After much discussion and no solution, I returned home and began Googling “can’t connect bank to PayPal” in earnest. This was twenty years ago and there wasn’t as much content online. Today, I can search for “How to build a table-top handloom from old vinyl records” and be rewarded – in about three seconds – with endless links to sites explaining the process, including how-to videos and photos of the finished project, as well as the four-foot-long, Beatles-themed wool scarf I could then weave on it. After an hour of searching the infant internet I finally came across a discussion forum where somebody mentioned that certain bank accounts actually include an extra digit that could often be found on the cheque, all alone, to the left of the printed account number. Sure enough, there it was, so I reinitiated the PayPal connection process and 24 hours later, the deposits finally appeared. When I called the bank to share this information with them, in case others asked, they remained skeptical.

One day, I deposited a cheque via the ATM. When I verified my balance, it seemed lower than I remembered. Luckily, we still kept a running balance in our cheque book back then, not yet completely trusting digital accounting devices. I returned home and a few hours later, checked my balance again by logging into my account online (they had finally got around to offering this option). Now, my balance appeared higher than my running tally said it should be. I went to bed and in the morning, I checked again. It had changed back to what it was before I deposited the cheque. Hmmm. I forgot about it, and few days later, my monthly statement arrived in the mail. The daily transactions showed a cheque deposit of $1020.90. The next line showed something like $120 being removed as an adjustment. The next line then showed $1000.90 credited as another adjustment, followed by another for $20.90. A few more ins and outs featuring amounts that bore random, numeric resemblance to the original deposit followed. Because it was too hard to untangle, I headed over to the bank to get the scoop on all this activity which basically rendered the checking of my balance an impossibility. When I showed the teller my bank statement with its incomprehensible ins and outs, she turned a bit pink and began to explain that she had mistakenly entered the incorrect amount from the cheque I had deposited in the ATM (this was back when the bank still manually verified all ATM deposits). She had then tried to correct her error and instead made another error, a slip of the ol’ finger on the keyboard. And so on, with several additional finger-slips apparently occurring. After careful review, I was able to confirm that the statement had been sent out prior to the final correction and the actual amount of the cheque had indeed been deposited and the actual bank balance now matched my cheque book.

As a designer, my job involved working with artists and cultural organizations in Québec and across Canada. One day, I received payment from a client based in Whitehorse, Yukon, so I zipped over to the bank to make a deposit in the ATM. By now, I had wised up, and would do anything to avoid waiting in the inevitable line. There was no line for the ATM, as it wasn’t popular with the older folks who made up the bulk of the midday queue. This was still before the days of smartphones and tablets, and most of our town didn’t even have wired internet connections – slow, satellite internet was the option du jour.

A couple of days later, while I was eating dinner, the phone rang. It was someone from the bank, telling me in an indignant tone that I couldn’t deposit U.S. currency in a Canadian account. The caller went on to inform me that they had been obliged to return the cheque via the mail and that I would be charged a fee for the offense and for the services required due to my error. When I asked what cheque they were talking about, since I couldn’t recall any recent American projects, it turned out to be the one I’d received from my client in Whitehorse. I tried, unsuccessfully, to explain that the cheque was most definitely Canadian but they would have none of it. We hung up, and the next morning, I drove over, Rand McNally Road Atlas in hand, to prove to them that Yukon was indeed in Canada. My client sent me a new cheque, which they accepted, but on subsequent visits to the bank, I always had the impression that they thought I’d pulled one over on them, and they were never quite going to forgive me for it.

As an immigrant, I had tried my best to follow the time-honoured advice of “When in Rome” but after these and a few more adventures in hometown banking, I finally gave up. I wrote a country song about my experiences (because what other kind of song can you write about something like this?) and recorded it with my band. Then I opened an account in another bank. Whenever I use my “foreign” debit card to pay, the cashier doesn’t recognize it and always has to ask me “Debit or credit?”, sometimes even taking it in her hand and turning it over to inspect it as if it isn’t real.