Adventures in Banking Sans Translator, Part 3

    I arrived at the bank on the appointed day about twenty minutes before the appointed time which was excellent as I needed to use the bathroom. I got a number because I wasn't sure how else to approach the subject of speaking with someone who doesn't have a designated office or anything. Then I made my trip to the facilities and returned to wait.

    My number was called 10 minutes before the appointed meeting time and the woman who had to accept my questions when I presented the business card of the guy who had yelled at me earlier that week was told by him that he still had 10 minutes and I should just wait. So she asked me for me to wait. At least there was no yelling at me.

    When he was ready, he came and got me and led me to one of the desk cubicles for a more private chat.

    Then he proceeded to scroll down his phone to a bunch of key set phrases that he had translated earlier. For some reason me not understanding banking terms to him meant I must not also understand phrases like "after that" despite me talking to him in Japanese the whole time.


From this week forward, should anyone ask if this is a bank, I will say no, it is a vacant building, filled with lies, incompetence and an ATM.

    The important thing was that he had called the post office and they decided that I needed to go fill out more forms to try to resend the money. He claimed that he would then do whatever actions needed to be done at the bank to make sure the money actually got to my account this time.

    He supplied a sticky note with all caps romanizations of the names of two people who he believed could help me at the post office, in one case chopping off the last letter so I would be guaranteed to sound like an idiot if I actually needed this information he was butchering in the process of providing. He asked if I could go there today and I said that I would as this is one of the few days when I could actually do another hour long walk across town and still get to all of my classes without any problems. This is only because every branch of the post office in my town happens to be closer to my home than this branch of this freaking bank.

    Thanks to my experiences with the M Bag Drama of a couple years back Sendai, I asked which exact post office location he meant for me to go to. Our town isn't huge but I can think of three different locations right off the top of my head and have no idea who he called. Apparently he had not considered this question in advance as he was forced to pull the location up on his phone. I was happy to see that it was the one closest to my house.

    He offered to type it into the maps app on my phone and I told him not to. He said he would phone ahead and let them know I was on my way. I then left and started on me hour long walk back toward my home.

Continued in Part 4.