How to get a bank off your back ... and other lessons

I'm from Ann Arbor. I have a t-shirt which says that. White cotton, blue letters, simple. Essentially the best item of clothing I own, the $9 piece of fiber, to those who matter, can say a lot. Edible sorority maidens usually tend to disagree with me about the profundity of this haute couture epitome. I know because every time I see a 20th Century Fox walking out of the washroom at a café or something and I make eye contact, she turns right around and cachinnates her ass off in giggles. It's as close as I will ever get to pleasing a woman physically. If she had thrown in a comment about my mother, showed me the Bebe-finger, pulled out an AK-47 foldable assault rifle out of her Prada handbag and pumped 18 rounds of kappa kappa gamma in me, trust me, it wouldn't get any worse. It's a pretty sad story, eh. Here's another one.

Waj Syed The Karachi Kama-Sutra

MIT, that paragon of tech academia, graduated this geek I went to school with and packed him off to a PhD. spot at Imperial College, London. Considering that he's a) Pakistani and b) an engine grad student, he was pretty broke when he got there. Evidently, his bank in Boston messed up the transferring of his account to the bank in England, and the poor bastard, without much knowledge of this, wrote out a bad check.

Now, before the rest of the story, a word about the Brits. Sure, they ruled the largest empire ever and invented rock and roll and miniskirts and tampons and all that, but they can't bank for shit. The Bank of England is better known as the Fat Royal Whore of All Central Banks. Its rules make Alan Greenspan look sexy and the Federal Reserve come across as a philanthropic yet risqué Green Party stronghold.

The rule applied to my friend was the three time processing fee regulation. If a check bounces (cheque, in the Queen's Dictum), Brit banks process it two more times and basically end up charging you thirty pounds each time. In essence, you pay 90 pounds when you should be paying only 30 for a faulty check. Its murder, my friend told them. F-off lad, was the message he got from the manager of Midlands Bank. Off to the lawyer. F-off bloke, was the message he got from the attorney. Nothing doing. It's in the rules. So is kicking your mom's Brit ass, my friend said, and stormed out. But like all good things, the revelation came in time. It took him to the court, where he headed off to the notary, presented the proper documents, and got his name changed.

Officially baptizing himself as "Midlands Bank Are Right Bastards," he walked back to the Midlands Bank manager and told him that his name change should be updated, that all the statements and correspondence the bank sent to him should be addressed to Mr. Midlands Bank Are Right Bastards, and that if they did it any other way, he was going to sue their Brit ass after reenacting the Battle of Britain with their mothers and sisters. Ending: The Brits at Midlands cancelled the charges and asked him to change his name back.

Yes sir, I have a bunch of them anecdotes. I could talk about this other guy who did a night on the town enhanced by some serious controlled-substance fornication and hit a donkey (yes, donkeys abound in Pakistan - roadkilling them is the unofficial national pastime) when he was flying back home in the Batmobile. He did not notice that there was this asinine corpse lying on the hood of his car till his dad pointed it out to him in the morning, so fubarred was the state of his state ... I could go on.

I could discuss the fact that all in all, the Wisconsin game ruled and the GAP boards on the Diag deserved annihilation. That that Penelope Cruz chick in the Woman on Top flick single-handedly and double-breastedly made the movie very viewable. That the Olympics are too much of an athletic fuckfest for developed nation-states with sponsor opulent sports programs, where nobleness bends over for Nike and where NBC's real purpose in bringing us the games is to proliferate global concord and not Comerica adverts. Sure, that would be very Ann Arbor, wouldn't it? Very liberal arts, very cutting edge, very Daily.

But I am the bastard son of reality, and even though this entire pg.4 echelon was supposed to be a sportive aberration from the usually embittered shit I publish, Kevin Heisinger deserves mention. Kevin, a School of Social work graduate student, died last August. He died because he was beaten to death and he died because bystanders failed to notify the police. Recently, the incident has inspired state legislators to propose good Samaritan laws in Michigan. For Kevin, lets hope we have something to root for other than the Henson-Terrell connection when the season ends. Cheers.

- Waj Syed can be reached

via e-mail at wajsyed@umich.edu.