I love those colorful, warm, friendly ads where banks offer the great unwashed masses loans to make a better life choke me with emotion. In full color, on the telly, over the FM.
You get the good feeling that someone cares. Housing, cars, personal loans, educational loans, loans on earlier loans all offered by your friendly, next door banker who gets up in the morning and has his corn flakes sloshed over with the milk of human kindness, his whole life a dedication to your comfort.
The ads fill me with wonderment. Look, how understanding they are. No payback for three months, low interest rates, easy installments, making your dreams come true, zillion times your salary, migoodness, who says financial institutions don’t have a heart.
So moved, many of us scamper off to the bank in the hope that life will now get a spring in its step and we are looking forward to the warmth of the reception.
What you get is forms. And more forms. And a slew of questions that make the Spanish Inquisition look like a romp in the park. Where has love gone, what happened to the ‘wouldn’t it be loverly’ content of the ad. These guys here obviously don’t read their own publicity. They are cold and all sneery and lip curling, if you get my drift. After they have stopped laughing at your gall in asking for a loan they want guarantees and letters from the company, from the sponsor, from your great grandparents, they want salary certificates, everything short of fingerprints though I am told that could be in the offing.
Not just that but you have this fond idea that the loan you apply for will be available to you in the evening and the wife and children are already getting dressed and ready for the bonanza. Even the neighbors know you are in for a windfall.
You see, you never spotted the ************* that go with the sunshine.
And now, here is this man telling you that your papers will now have to be processed. Like it was cheddar cheese.
And the chasm gets wider by the minute, this great big gap between the promise and the reality. Like you have been ten rounds with Mike Tyson. Battered and humiliated.
I am thinking, why can’t we have real, honest, the way it is ads so that the less brilliant among us don’t tell the neighbors and then get upstaged and squashed at the same time.
So, what I would like to see is a bank ad that says: Look, you horrible, poverty stricken nobodies, we don’t really give a toss about you but, we do have this scheme where we give you some money so that we can charge you huge sums of interest, but before we do that we tar and feather you and tie you up in legal knots and make you sign your life away and once we have you in a corner then we chase you and hound you even if you are one day late in repayment and we call you in the house, in the office, on the mobile and freeze your accounts and make you cringe with humiliation and leave messages with your colleagues so your neighbors know and after we have battered you, you get the money and you can canter off and realize your silly little middle class dreams.
So, what’s that about those clouds in the sky we see in the ads and those happy faces and those goodies raining down upon us and corn fields swaying in the breeze?
Oh, that’s another department, nothing to do with us.
