Scotland has finally sent me my money back, and just in the nick of time: it’s the holidays and I need that cash to make sure the Heaton family Christmas tree is properly stocked with bottles of whiskey wrapped in festive paper as if decorated by flamboyantly homosexual street vagrants.

Whilst living in Scotland last year I transferred the majority of my (even then meager) assets to a British bank, which for our purposes today will remain nameless. Partly because, despite the some four months it took them to actually return any of my money, they were to their credit immensely polite and friendly throughout the root-canal-like financial ordeal. Further, while I’m pretty sure I’ve paid my taxes correctly, I see no reason to give the IRS a specific pretext to audit me.

This particular bank issues neato electric card readers, which are like something James Bond would use for an ATM. Normally you can stick your charge card into the doodad and it will spit out a unique digital code, which you input on a website to make online transactions with. Throughout the year I asked my bank if I could please have one of these nifty futuristic bank thingies, and they always absolutely agreed to send me one and then immediately failed to do so.

I figured my bank didn’t trust me with complex gizmos and was being too polite to flat out turn me down. I like interacting with people, even bankers, so I decided to go into the bank personally for all of my transactions when I lived in Scotland. When I finally departed I dropped by to ask, “How do I go about transferring my bank account here to my American account?” Vaguely hoping they would stuff it all into a briefcase and then handcuff it to me for the plane flight home.

But no. “Easy!” they said. “Just let us know what your new address is in America, then send us a letter from that address, so we’ll know it’s you, specifying where and how much to send. Make sure you sign it, as we must have an original signature.”

You might think that sending letters by post with a flourish of personal handwriting is a tad outdated in terms of global business. And you are correct. But you must keep in mind that we are talking about an island which considers “quaint” a sacred legal concept similar to how Americans view private property rights or the equity of shooting burglars as they flee from your backyard.

For instance, despite the fact that half of everybody over there is an uppity atheist, they still let twenty-six bishops hang out in their House of Lords. Which itself is a toothless institution existing primarily to shove mossback politicians into which party leadership hopes to store in a harmless location.

Whereas AMERICA’s head of state is a 6’1’” black man who did crack in college and smokes cigarettes at the White House, the British head of state is an 85 year-old-woman with an extensive hat collection who married a vampire.

So, upholding British whimsical financial protocol, I drafted a letter to my bank and mailed it to them from Oklahoma:

At this point the system becomes far more complex, because as the letter is physical and not electronic, it took several months to actually arrive in Scotland. We don’t know all of the locations which my letter may have visited, but we can safely assume it accrued more frequent flyer miles than I’ve yet to.

Eventually by some miracle the letter actually arrived in Scotland, and even in Edinburgh. This is fantastic, because I had addressed the thing to my local branch, where I had previously spoken to them about how to get my money back. Upon receiving the letter, my local bank immediately noticed the international postage and forwarded it, unopened, to the Regional Branch on the other side of town, which allegedly handles international concerns.There, after being used as a coaster for three weeks, a bank teller eventually opened it and perused the contents. Accurately assessing that it should have gone to my local bank, where they could authorize the transfer of my funds, he faxed them a copy of the letter and then presumably crumpled the original copy and tossed it into a large Victorian furnace behind his desk.

Two or three weeks later my local branch e-mailed me to chastise me for sending a photocopied letter. It needed and original signature, which they had made abundantly clear from the beginning. I would, of course, need to write a new letter and send it to them.

During this time the UK Parliament decided to mandate quantitative easing, which is to say crank out money from a printer to intentionally devalue the currency. Including my currency.

At this point, after several Skype phone calls and bottles of aspirin, I finally managed to convince someone to mail me one of their fancy electronic card readers so I could bypass the many friendly yet utterly useless bank staffers and go straight to competent, cold-hearted robots.

Which means I can, sort of, make international transfer payments. So I went to the proper web page for international transfers, selected myself as a recipient, and hit “transfer.” It thanked me and informed me that I would very shortly be receiving a shiny embossed check from my bank, which even then was being mailed to half of the first line of my parents’ address:

Mr. Andrew Heaton

38290 Poplar Stre

That’s it. That was the whole address. I went back through to see if I could add a state or country or something, but no, the bank felt very confident in the deductive reasoning powers of the US Postal Service.

Astoundingly, against all odds, the money actually arrived at my parents’ address in Oklahoma. Which took them utterly by surprise. Here for months I had been telling them I didn’t have any money at all. In fact my current job search has been entirely financed by low interest loans from the Bank of Dad based on this premise.

At this point in life I have used four banks: two British and two American. Of them, the Bank of Oklahoma is vastly superior at international banking transactions. Because, as near as I can tell, there are only eight people who work there, so it’s virtually impossible to talk to a robot or some outsourced employee using Skype in the Punjab. Plus, it’s entirely possible that I am the Bank of Oklahoma’s only international client.

In all prior transactions, what takes larger institutions weeks, if not months, is handled by the good people at the Bank of Oklahoma in less time than it takes to do laundry.

How To Make an International Bank Transfer