Here’s the scenario:
I get to the drive through at the bank. It has two lanes. One lane has a few cars piled up in it, the other lane is empty. Naturally, I pull into the empty lane and send my stuff to the teller. I can hear the tube come back to the car next to me, they get their receipt and drive away. The next person pulls up and sends their stuff in. The teller says something to me and I mumble something back along the lines of ‘Hi, good, thanks’ and go back to staring at my phone. A few seconds later, she says ‘did you hear me?’* and I said ‘not really what?’ and she said ’ the car in the other lane got here before you, so I’m going to process his deposit first’ and I said ‘uhhh, ok’ in a half annoyed voice.
So, my question is, am I correct in being annoyed? She had my deposit in her hand before his. She could have processed it and sent it back before he even got up to the drive through.
Or, was she correct? He had, technically, been waiting longer, so he goes first.
I go to multiple banks and go to them a lot, I don’t think I’ve even seen a teller that paid any attention to the order that the cars stacked up in line. They just process the transactions as the tubes come in and send them back out. Or if they do, they don’t tell the customer.
*Part of what annoyed me with all of this is when the teller said ‘Did you hear what I said’. This teller, when you send the tube to her, will say ‘How’s your day going’ or ‘hi, how are you today’ or something like that. If you don’t answer her, she’ll say it again or say ‘Did you hear me?’ or ‘What? I didn’t hear you’ until you answer her. Then she starts working on your deposit. I thought that’s where she was going with that, and it bugs me when she does that. I’ve always left it alone as ‘just one of those things’ that’s probably just me, until someone else mentioned it. I was talking to someone and mentioned that I had just come from that bank and he said ‘oh, the one with the teller that keeps asking how your day is’…yup. At least it’s not just me.
PS, during all this, I was really annoyed and just in the time I was waiting, I managed to send them an annoyed complaint about it. I assumed I’d be dismissed or ignored, but they actually asked for some follow up so they could use it as a “coaching opportunity”. Part of me wants to just let it go, but part of me was really annoyed and wants to email them back along with the *'d part of this post too, especially since I have some confirmation that I’m not the only person annoyed by that.