Preparation

As much as Fosters and Ten Canoes turned out to be not quite representative of what I would find in Australia, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has a bit more to say about the present-day U.S. of A.

Surprisingly, I'm not referring to the gun-slinging, trigger happy cowboy Western-type culture - what I'm referring to is the banking world. Indeed, in the country that has lead the capitalist part of the World for the best part of a century, not much seems to have changed during that time. Walking in to a bank, you still have the steel-framed tellers (not even necessarily with bullet-proof glass), the massive wooden desks, the low-luminosity, green-capped light bulbs on all the white-chalked pylons as well as on aforementioned desks, the proud American flag in the back of the room, next to a bunker-type passage that probably leads to the vault. I agree that the fluorescent lamps on the ceiling and the computers on the desks were probably put in place long after the days of Butch Cassidy, but probably not too long after that. (I didn't manage to get a glance on the screen, but judging by the speed of the computer, it wouldn't totally surprise me if they were still running some DOS version or worse. Is it possible to connect a newish Dell-screen to a Commodore 64?)

On the outside my bank looks pretty much like any bank in Europe, but there are banks (a bit further out of town), which have a porch like in the good old days, or - even better - a tower with a clock, as you wouldn't expect them outside of (New) Mexico and Hollywood.

As far as functioning, the same thing seems to apply: chips in bank cards are unheard of - though bank cards (and even some form of internet banking) have been invented. This does not remove the importance of checks, though. Maybe this is because I am and always have been a self-confessed ignorant in banking matters, but I honestly thought checks were something of the past - I had never seen one before last week. Nevertheless, my present means of paying rent is to send a check by mail. That's right: I'm not supposed to just transfer the money onto another account - I _send_a_check_by_mail_. (I'd try to claim this is just WV, but my landlady lives in Pennsylvania, so it must be more widespread than this.)

Surprisingly, my pay does get transferred directly into my account - though that seems to be a recent change, because I've received multiple pamphlets explaining why this is a better way of doing things that to get a check in the mail and then cash it at the bank (as they apparently used to do before too long).

Finally, a quote from Wikipedia to keep you all entertained. After listing how countries as varied as Tunesia and Saudi Arabia (and, of course, the entire EU) deal with international banking codes, it says this:

"Hence payments to U.S. bank accounts from outside the U.S. are prone to errors of routing."