I went to my bank’s ATM this morning around 5 a.m. I sometimes do that just to ensure that the ATM is still there. There may or may not be any money in my account but the ATM’s existence is paramount. It creates a false sense of hope in me that if the ATM exists, soon there could be money in my account too. But I digress.
I had gone to deposit ten dollars; yes, literally ten dollars because it is only niggardly amounts like that ensure that I do not overdraw. But I digress.
As I slipped my card in, I saw a spider right next to it. It is safe to assume that the spider was not there to withdraw money. The world of spiders is not built on an economy like ours. A spider carefully weaves her web for hours and then waits for hours for a prey to get ensnared. In a manner of speaking, the cash comes to the spider and not the other way.
Since it takes hardly any time to cough up a ten-dollar bill, I did not wait at the ATM machine much. But even during that short time and much after that I have thought about how we are the only sentient life which has created such a complex web, if you pardon the silly pun, out of our lives for what is essentially just existence. That spider, for instance, has no use for what is inside that ATM. It is not worried that drawing seven dollars might overdraw her account and the bank might slap an overdraft fee of $35. It happened the other day with me. For a transaction of seven dollars, which I did not have, the bank charged a $35 overdraft fee.
I called the bank’s customer service to discuss the problem. I started by asking a very polite customer service representative this: “If I don’t have seven dollars, why do you think I will have 35? Before this transaction I did not have seven dollars and after it I don’t have 42. So what’s the point?”
She was genuinely confused by my question. “Sir, your account went into overdraft and that triggered the 35 dollar fee,” she said with the confidence of someone who had done a PhD in “Stating the obvious”.
I said I know and would she be kind enough to waive the $35 fee. She said she would try and try she did and, mercifully, waive she did.
So to meet that overdraft I went to deposit ten dollars this morning and found the spider weave its web. You are lucky you are a spider, I told her. Incidentally, it is the only the female spider that weaves webs. She did not answer because, you know, spiders do not talk.