Trouble with a capital T

Today I received a letter from my bank. It was a long letter. Legal size paper. My attitude is, when I do get a letter from just about anyone official, the longer the letter, the less I’m going to like it. The bank, the credit card company, the water department, the electric company, the gas company—they all fall into this category.

And when the letter begins “Exciting new news,” or “Exciting new benefits,” I know beyond the shadow of a doubt, there’s trouble with a capital T, and it rhymes with P, and that’s probably what I will want to do with the letter when I finish reading it.

I was not incorrect. My bank was about to “upgrade” (another word that means Trouble) my checking account. It was not going to cost me anything, and I was going to get a whole slew of wonderful “new benefits” (yet another trigger word). So many new, exciting benefits that they had to use legal size paper just to list them. There was just one eeentsy, teenstsy problem: I did not want these new benefits. I especially did not want to have anyone notify me of shopping, dining, travel, hotel, recreation, entertainment, prescription, vision and hearing aid deals. I get more than enough junk and spam emails, letters and phone calls right now, thank you.

So I called the customer service department. And I “just said no.”  While I was at it, I not only did not upgrade my checking account, I downgraded it to a no-interest, minimum balance of $100 account.  Currently, I get a whopping .01, that’s one tenth of one percent, interest if I maintain a $1,000 balance. If my balance falls below that for a nano-second, I get charged $8.00 for the month. The interest averages about $8.00 a year—on which I pay Federal and State taxes. You can do the math. I told the nice young man on the phone that I was simplifying my life.

Do you wonder why Bernie Sanders has the appeal he has? I don’t.