Nightmare

On the way to
the bank

 Absolute horror story today ... a nightmare. That's going to the bank. No other country in the world is quite like here. Walked 1km to the City to deposit money because of many books bought for the library and the account was very low on finds. Usually our central financial dept does all the deposits and transfers bu now with a new director, each institute has to do its own banking operations. So I got there and firstly I couldn't register and get a number because the machine kept rejecting my ID. Then a lady teller came to help but she turned into Frankenstein's bride. One hour of screaming and yelling at her colleagues for not giving her the answer she wanted. I was moved from one dept to another and back to her office where I got her to speak to our financial people back at our office. After 10 minutes of hassle, she finally understood and said I am allowed to deposit the money. Yes ... it's about depositing money. You can't deposit your own money here unless it's approved by the bank manager or something like that. She wanted to know where the money came from and I couldn't prove it's provenance. So she didn't allow my deposit to go through. Utterly unbelievable. 

Then when I was allowed to deposit, I was sent to a teller at the other end of the bank. And she couldn't find our account on the computers. 20 minutes of searching with name, account number, passport number ... nothing. Then suddenly she said she found it. By the time the transaction was finished an entire hour had passed. And it takes me an hour to walk back to my office. It was a horror story. You feel utterly abused by the whole drama. All I can advise you is if you're coming to Israel, don't open a bank account. Keep your money under your pillow.