A day at the bank

Yesterday I was at the bank to deposit money into an account. While entering the bank I was wondering what kind of issue I am going to face on that day - the reason is most of the time I had ended up like a fool or with a quarrel. Definitely not comfortable with the bank procedures. I thought I need to do a wire transfer as the account was in a distant city. Not able to find any suitable form, I approached the staff. He was quite friendly in guiding; that was a surprise.

After that I got a token from the vending machine hanging at the entrance. Bank has placed costly leather sofa sets in front of the counters. I was waiting for a seat to get empty and swiftly occupied it. Then came the waiting period. My token number is 150 and the running number was 48 ... oh! I did some simple maths to time the process. Out of the 3 or 4 counters, it took 30 minutes to handle 25 tokens. This includes missed tokens whose owners didn't turn up when they were called.

I had to wait for 2 hours. Since the bank was close to college, the customers were quite interesting and I was able to pass time easily. Once in a while I checked the running counter to verify my calculation. Thou there were times the tokens moved too slow, ultimately I was served in 2 hours.

This time my transaction went through without any issue. What a luck! otherwise I might have to wait another 2 hours. After coming out, I was wondering about the time spent there. Definitely the system is far better than what it used to be - that is standing in separate queues and seeing other queues moving fast. One approach could be that the customers get their tokens through phone or net. They also get to know the approx time +/- 30mins to be at the bank. This might save lots of time of customers and the workload, stress of the bank. Not sure about the technicality, feasibility and practicality.