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What seemed weird when I visited your country
pwhodges:
--- Quote from: LookingIn on 21 Dec 2013, 17:43 ---copies of the cancelled check are sent with monthly statements
--- End quote ---
My bank stopped doing that in the early 1970s... but they were just a minor organisation (called Barclays).
Skewbrow:
--- Quote from: Loki on 21 Dec 2013, 23:13 ---And of course all transfers show up in the paper trail.
Pretty much everything in Germany has a paper trail :roll:
--- End quote ---
The bank used to mail me a bimonthly summary of all the transfer related to my savings account (never had a checking acoount here) until may be a year ago. The same information is available to me on-line, so it would be kinda pointless to continue sending those. My choice actually - my bank also has customers who are not used to using the internet, so they probably opt to do it in a more old-fashioned way.
A useful by-product of on-line banking is that the identification provided by banks is used elsewhere as well. For example, once something went wrong when I was renewing my password to my university computer account. I was able to restore my credentials on-line, when my identity was certified by the bank (so while following the renewal instructions, one of the steps was done at the bank's web server, and somehow the university's server could use that confirmation message - I'm unfamiliar with the technology). Nifty, eh?
LookingIn:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 22 Dec 2013, 02:36 ---
--- Quote from: LookingIn on 21 Dec 2013, 17:43 ---copies of the cancelled check are sent with monthly statements
--- End quote ---
My bank stopped doing that in the early 1970s... but they were just a minor organisation (called Barclays).
--- End quote ---
Most if not all banks here in the US or at least in the northeast US stopped sending the actual cancelled checks back to the sender about seven or eight years ago. We have accounts out of a RBS subsidiary and have had ones out of a TD subsidiary and Bank of America so the banks aren't exactly small but not exactly Barclays size...
calenlass:
I remember being pleasantly surprised by the discovery of tiny electric water heaters in the UK. We have them here in the US, I have since found out, but we also tend to only use them in fancy expensive houses or remodels, which is stupid.
Also, maybe this was more of a Glasgow-flat specific thing, or maybe this was a "student-housing" thing, but in Scotland I remember being much less pleasantly surprised by the fact that the showers were basically just walled off with a half-wall functioning as a splash shield, without curtains or a glass door or anything. How do you keep the heat in, you crazy fucks? My butt was so fucking cold every time I showered! I realize baths are way more popular than they are here, but still. Hands down the worst part of every visit, including the one where I had bronchitis/walking pneumonia.
Method of Madness:
Wait, that's what glass doors and shower curtains are for? I thought they were just to keep water from splashing. Interesting.
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