i only wear white when it rains

After seven years of neglect,
I finally called it quits

My local bank — where I was lured in long ago by a promotional interest rate that dropped to .00000001% the month after I opened my account — just shut down yet another one of its branches.

When it first fled from St Pete to Pinellas Park, I schlepped to the farther away Tampa location instead. Because like most people with a complete set of teeth and mixed feelings about the second amendment, I avoid Pinellas Park.

Over the years, my bank gradually became the inattentive boyfriend whose complacency you overlook because you’re just too lazy to clean your shit out of his garage.

But I wasn’t remaining loyal for convenience, good service or an interest rate that yields more than a nickel a year. It was more the debilitating lethargy that set in the second I considered changing the automatic drafts on my Nordstrom card or cable bill.

Plus with e-statements and e-billing, who the hell even knows which cable company I use? Or what rectum I’m going to have to colonoscopy to get the passwords to change all this billing information anyway?

Needless to say, I was heartbroken when the Tampa location closed leaving me alone with its seedy Pinellas Park uncle leering at my breasts and slurring, “It’s just you and me babe.”

I had to make a change.

Close proximity to Starbucks? Sounds good to me

Fees, hand sanitizer near the pens, interest rates, Dum-dums in the drive-thru.

I had no idea what criteria I’d use to choose a new bank, but knew I’d have to save all that mental energy for figuring out how to answer my own security questions in order to gain access to my progress energy bill (who was my fourth grade teacher? Really? I barely remember the professors I blew in college*).

Ultimately I chose a bank where the president is a friend of a friend, utilizing the same logic that goes into all those Target dollar bin purchases.

“This egg white separator is a good thing to have. I’m sure I’ll use it someday.”

Never mind that I won’t.

So armed with total disdain for any place with fluorescent lighting and the sound of women’s pantyhose rubbing together when they walk to the coffee machine, I set out to open a new account and begin the arduous process of telling the world I finally broke up with my bank after years of neglect.

As I looked around the place where I’d soon be depositing all my welfare checks, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the “Senior Personal Banker” setting up my account. Dress code dictated she sport an embroidered black golf shirt that looked more Sears Tire Center than FDIC-insured financial institution. And her desk was jutting out of the center of the lobby like an afterthought or timeout chair. With no partitions or so much as a fake plant to separate her from everyone who wanders in off the street, the poor woman would never be able to update her Facebook status.

But I’m assuming if she could, it would be something like, “Would love to close my door so I can burp really loudly, but…oh shit.”

Or, “Phil Mickelson wearing my same shirt today.”

Anyway, once I shook off the feeling that she was really a Senior Personal Camp Counselor (I couldn’t get past the shirt) and after depositing my entire money market savings into my new account, I went home to begin switching over my automatic drafts. With car payments, Target RedCards, et al, tethered to my old account, this exercise had me so cranky and mentally spent, I snapped at my daughter for requesting breakfast. It was 5:30 pm.

Seven days and five meltdowns later (you know the kind that have you asking people around you to “stop breathing so loudly” because you’re trying to think), I logged in to my new online banking site to make sure my money was disappearing at warp speed from the correct account.

I was overdrafted $359.

How is that even possible?

Did my Senior Personal Camp Counselor use all my money to buy herself a cubicle or lifetime supply of twill polo shirts?

Turns out my new bankfriend placed all my money on a 10-DAY hold, despite my deposit being a cashier’s check to myself which would imply next-day availability and without ever thinking this might be useful information to give me while I am sitting across from her.

Wedding Singer theme penetrates dentist office as well

After a recent routine cleaning, my dentist (who has an irksome habit of singing everything he says) serenaded me with a song called, “If you have an extra three grand laying around, come back next week so I can attempt to undo your childhood addiction to Laffy Taffy.”

Me and my bell’s palsy Novocaine face

I returned a week later to allow my baritone DDS to whittle away at what would be left of my already expensive (just ask my mother) teeth to prepare them for their new crowns (aptly named after the amount of jewelry you’ll have to pawn to pay for them). For $3k, I’d prefer tiaras.

Only after using a dental AK-47 to inject massive amounts of Novocaine directly into my jaw for about 10 minutes straight (humming how it is more effective [at torturing me] if he goes slow), he tells me that he doesn’t recommend the crowns until I have a periodontist perform a gum graft.

Huh?

I don’t know what the mother bitch that is, but somewhere between spilling a quart of saliva onto my chest because I was too numb to feel it, and suppressing the urge to scrape his eyes out, Adam Sandler’s voice was once again shouting the obvious.

So I left there with the entire right side of my face completely paralyzed despite having nothing done save for the molding of new bleaching trays. Because in the event a periodontist does sew new gums into my mouth, I would like to be able to order my crowns in a shade lighter than mahogany.

Now, totally hating this lounge singer who somehow barbershop quartetted his way through dental school, but on the hook for the bleaching trays, I had to return a few days later to the site of this dentastrophe to pick them up. The assistant jammed the custom molded bleaching tray into my upper arch to check the fit and handed me four measly vials of bleach she just fished out of the drawer. Not exactly the “Professional Whitening Package” you paid hundreds for, but in line with the professionalism of a place where the dentist numbs you to tell you he cannot perform the procedure you’re there for because he forgot to actually look in your mouth the week before.

“Where is the tray for the bottom?” I asked, sensing she was about to leave the room.

She looked at me confused.

“Oh,” she said. “You wanted the bottom too? We didn’t discuss that.”

For a full five minutes of my life that I will never get back we debated the possible merits of only bleaching one half of your mouth.

To summarize: there are none.

But apparently it is my fault for not clarifying that I didn’t only want some of my teeth bleached.

Once again…information that might have been a little more useful to me yesterday.

*Just kidding, Nana! Second base was as far as we got.