So I was a bit surprised when I stopped into a branch of Chase on Monday morning – Aug. 16, 2010, not even two years after it received public assistance in an amount so beyond my realm that I cannot even say it out loud without counting the zeros manually – and was denied notary services. The branch employee reminded me of the main character on Designing Women. She walked out from behind the counter and over to a desk, where she gestured for me to have a seat. This is going to be nice and easy, I thought. She got out a rectangular, leather-bound book and, as she opened it, said, “I’m assuming you have an account with us.” No, I told her, I did not. She closed the book and said the notary service is for Chase customers only. It’s only a one-page reference form, I told her. “You’re welcome to open an account,” she said haughtily. I was tempted to tell her that she was welcome to stop pretending to be anything other than a welfare queen, but instead I told her she was ridiculous and got up and left.
About half an hour later I went to the US Bank branch on NE Glisan. There I was told that they could notarize the reference form for me, but, since I’m not their customer, it would cost $10.00. For a moment I considered taking the woman up on her offer. $10.00 is not going to sink the ship around here, but the principle of it infuriates me. It seems to me that notaries are public servants and that they ought to serve the public, the same public, in the case of bank employees, to whom they owe their livelihoods. I also started wondering as I was walking back to the house about people who are in seriously dire straits, especially those whose straits are particularly dire due to the recession we’re in thanks to companies like US Bank and Chase. What do people already living deep within the money hole do when they need something notarized? What about people who don’t have bank accounts? What about people who don’t have half the day to traipse around town in order to make something official? What if their inability to get something notarized (and pay for it) costs them a job? A loan? Anything, in fact, that might go toward getting on firm financial ground? Where’s their bailout?
I got the form notarized yesterday morning at the Bank of America. The guy who performed the ceremony was kind of attractive and kind of flirty. “You have really nice handwriting,” he said. I said, why thank you. There was something sort of soothing about the entire procedure. He matched my actual face up with the picture on the driver’s license, and then watched very closely as I signed my name on the reference form. There is nothing automated or electronic about the notary business: you have to prove that you’re alive, and that you are who you say you are. It’s a business that appears completely unscathed by the Internet. Once the form was notarized and safely ensconced in my backpack, I decided to ask the guy where the account number is entered in the ledger. It’s not, he said. The account number is just for him to verify that I am indeed a customer of the bank, a bank that, in my opinion, I actually own whether I keep any money there or not.
