I work at a credit union. Any job where you interact with the general public on a regular basis generates its own series of humorous tales as the foibles of humanity are put on display. For instance, the war vet who regularly stops in, being chauffeured around in his mid-70’s white limo. His driver is an elderly man wearing orthopedic shoes to compensate for his left leg that is 3 inches shorter than his right, and a Grateful Dead t-shirt. At one point the vet told us he had stopped at the hospital for pain killers, and they had denied him drugs because they thought he was mentally unstable. His reply was that he knew he was mentally unstable, but he was still in pain!
Yesterday was another good example of credit union oddity. We have a coin counter machine – a large ATM like contraption that you can pour your loose change into and it will sort and total them for you. This machine is almost always at the center of the CU circus – the kinds of people that hoard large amounts of change are apparently not your usual crowd. We find odd things in the reject bin too – foreign coins are common, along with paper and lint but occasionally stranger things make a showing. A few days ago it was a bear claw, not the pastry but a real bear claw, once attached to an actual bear.
A man came in to use ours yesterday. This man had somehow used a coconut as a piggy bank, with a way to put coins in but no way to retreive them. I do not know if he forgot how to open it, or forgot to check if he could open it before heading into the branch, but either way this culminated in him asking to borrow a hammer from us and proceeding to attempt to smash open a coconut in our lobby. This man obviously had no prior coconut-opening experience, because it took him close to 5 minutes of pounding, smashing, cursing, and generally scaring all the other patrons in our lobby before he finally retrieved his prize – $4.38 in change.
