I decided a couple months ago it was about time to start a savings account.  I know, I'm lame to just be getting around to it.  But I'd gotten a nice chunk of change back in taxes and knew I'd piss it away if I didn't hide it under a mattress somewhere.  Citizens seemed the natural choice, since I already have a checking account there.

So I dropped into the Copley branch, and spoke to a rep I remembered from some years ago, when she was a lowly teller and gave me a hard time with my passport.  I actually didn't remember her, despite the thick Albanian accent (which I recognized immediately from adventures with NATO in my youth), until she started giving me a hard time about my passport again. (It's a funny, old-fashioned looking one issued by the American Embassy in Budapest, but totally works like a normal one, at least abroad.)

"If you hadn't already had an account with us," she snarked, "I would not have accepted this ID."

Well, La-tee-da.  Thanks for sharing. 

Anyway, all I wanted to do was open a savings account.  And you would think that that would be enough for them.  But they are trained to mercilessly up-sell, and the thing you should know about Albanians — they'll stop at nothing.  They don't take no for an answer.  There is actually no word for no in Albanian.

So she wanted to sell me this new "green$ense" debit card, and there was no stopping her.  It's one of these "rewards" cards, where you supposedly get money back for using it.  The twist here is that they rope you in by appealing to your sense of morality — they're green rewards.  Truth is, all they're looking to do is maximize their profits, and they want you to do all the work.  Only purchases that you sign for — rather than punch in your PIN — garner points, because fees that merchants pay for signature debit card transactions are significantly higher than for PIN purchases.

The sad thing about capitalism is that it takes even things that should make you feel good and makes them feel dirty.  I mean, I already do all my banking online, and get e-statements rather than hard copies, so I'm already as "green" as I'm gonna be.  Still, they're trying to sell the idea of it back to me, with a little greed added in for good measure.  They're basically pimping you out for pennies on the dollar. 

I don't need the incentive.  All I'm interested in is not being buried under a mountain of paperwork.  Once I week I have to sift through all the crap I've accumulated through no effort of my own that has piled up on my desk, and toss out the Netflix coupons that come with every movie, the chinese takeout menus they stuff in my mailbox, the letters for jilted lovers.  It's a full-time job.

But I've managed to pack roughly the last fifteen years into one little box, and half a shelf on my bookshelf...


But I bit, anyway.  I don't know.  I think I was afraid of what would happen if I crossed Miss Albania. 

So I left the bank with my new savings account, which I can manage online, and I signed up for the green$ense debit account, because, hey, greed — er, I mean green — is good, right?  I had made it a point to smack down Miss Albania whenever she tried to sell me something else — she was working the credit card pretty hard — but to my knowledge (and I was sure to read everything I signed) I had not signed on for one.

Well, in the week after opening my savings account, my mailbox was stuffed with a shrubs-worth of offers from Citizens — none related to products I had previously signed up for — packets offering identity-theft protection plans, life insurance, and something called the Citizens Bank Miss Albania Nose Job Fund — and no less than three different non-recyclable polyvinyl chloride cards, debit and credit, with no end in sight. 

All for going green!