Banks Are For Your Money- Not For Drinking With

Are you sick of corporations trying to come across as some sort of charitable service to the community? (I know most corporations would like to have charitable tax status ie pay no tax, but that's another matter entirely.) The piece below is for you.

The banks are coming over all chummy. It's nauseating
Charlie Brooker, The Guardian, Monday November 6, 2006

So the other day I'm using an ATM, and while I'm tapping IN my PIN number, trying to perform an obfuscating contemporary dance with my fingers so it looks like I'm typing different numbers to the ones I'm actually using, my eyes momentarily alight on the top of the cashpoint and I notice it isn't a cashpoint at all. Not officially, anyway.

It's been renamed The Hole in the Wall. Right there on the machine itself. Barclays has taken the unofficial, slang name for the ATM, and legitimised it. It is co-opting the language of the people. It is trying to pretend it is "one of us". It can piss off.

It gets worse. Next to the door, there's a sign reading "Through these doors walk the nicest people in the world" - which strikes you as monumentally nauseating, until you realise it's a little gag: beneath, in smaller lettering, it says something along the lines of " . . . as voted by their mums". Tee hee, Barclays! Tee hee!

When I get home, I do a bit of Googling and discover this japery has been going on for a while; I just hadn't noticed until now. Apparently, it's all part of a re-branding exercise.

Barclays felt it was perceived as being too stuffy, too formal, so it decided to replace traditional banking jargon with chummy, colloquial language. The ATM became The Hole in the Wall the customer service desk has a sign saying Can I Help? over it, and the Bureau de Change has been rechristened Travel Money.

Why leave it at that? If you're hell-bent on making your bank look and sound like a simpleton, a desk labelled Travel Money is still a bit too formal. Why not call it Oooh! Look at the Funny Foreign Banknotes! instead? And accompany it with a doodle of a French onion-seller riding a bike, with a little black beret on his head and a baguette up his arse and a speech bubble saying, "Zut Alors! Here is where you gettez les Francs!"

Actually, why still call yourself a bank at all? "Bank" sounds boring. Call yourself "Barclays Money Circus" instead.

Don't know about you, but I feel like vomiting myself inside out whenever big businesses try to cute themselves up this way - all lower case brand names and twee little jokes and overuse of the words "you" and "my" and "we" and "us" as though we're a bunch of cuddly-wuddly pals and hey, we're all in this crazy world together, so let's have some fun with it, right guys?

It's the modern equivalent of someone who uses multiple exclamation marks to denote how ZANY!!!!! they are. It's desperate. Anyway, one solution is to come up with new colloquial terminology they can't co-opt. Sod The Hole in the Wall. They've absorbed that one. Let's start calling ATMs Coinshitters instead. See how long it takes Barclays to start using that. My guess is quite a while.

Frankly, Wetherspoons has the best idea- turn banks into pubs...