Consequences #13 — Rodney
He was going to pay. It was just a question of how …
“It’s easy,” Susanne explained. “You just go into the bank and give them the bank details and ask them to transfer the money to the account.”
“Er … can you do that in this country?”
“Of course! Why could you not do it? It’s a modern country, isn’t it?”
“Well … what’s wrong with sending a cheque?”
“A cheque? Are you crazy? Who uses cheques? In Germany, we have not for fifteen years had cheques.”
“Ah. But we have, you see. They’ll expect a cheque. Everyone uses cheques. In fact, I don’t think there’s any other way of giving people money, without using cheques.”
“But that’s ridiculous! Of course you must be able to transfer money. You can do it in every other European country. Why not here? Why use old-fashioned things like cheques?”
“Ah, well, now you put it like that. Okay, I’ll ask at the bank.”
Later, at the bank, he went up to the cashier. It was a sunny Friday afternoon, shortly before closing time. She smiled at him.
“I need to transfer some money to these people. Here are their bank details.”
She stopped smiling and looked at him with a twisted mouth, like she’d just sucked on a lemon.
“Is the account with a different bank? Then we can’t do that.”
“No?”
Well, exactly.
At home, he explained the incident.
“But that is crazy. What sort of nineteenth-century set up do you have here?”
“Well, anyway, why not just send a cheque through the post?”
“What? That’s crazy. It could get stolen!”
“Why should it get stolen?”
“In Germany it happens all the time. Letters get stolen or are not delivered.”
“But that’s impossible. The Germans Are Highly Efficient™ — everyone knows that.”
“Well, not the postal service.”
“Ah, well, the Royal Mail is pretty reliable. And anyway, it doesn’t matter if the cheque is stolen.”
“Why not? Someone could cash the cheque.”
“Remember when you wanted me to cash a cheque for you and I said I couldn’t pay it into my account? I wasn’t making that up. It’s why each cheque has ‘Account Payee only’ on it. You can only pay it into an account in the name of the payee.”
“Ah.”
So he wrote a cheque. You do what you’re used to.