7.b.vi.
Franklin Buck
preferred the running. At least that
made sense. This debtor’s prison made no
sense at all. After that enormous,
meandering escalator he’d found himself in a small lobby with a popcorn machine
and free coffee. There was a teller
window, behind which was a door. On this
door was a sign indicating a stairwell leading to the lobby. The only way to get beyond the teller window
and continue his efforts to find the lobby floor was to sign up for a free
checking account. As soon as he’d signed
his name and had been issued a debit card, a team of burly security guards
slapped cuffs on his wrists and hauled him into a dimly lit corridor where they
tossed him into a cell.
An hour later
a piece of mail dropped into his holding pen, through a slot in the wall.
It was an
account balance statement alerting him to an overdraft of funds. Apparently, upon the opening of his account
it was noted that there were insufficient funds which, and the terms of the
free account clearly stipulated (in paragraph twelve of subsection thirty-two
of the sixteenth entry under the heading account
parameters), that should an account carry a balance under five hundred dollars
then a twenty-five dollar fee would be applied.
Furthermore, there was an additional twenty-five dollar convenience
charge for the pleasure of speaking with a real live teller. The debit card was free, but another
twenty-five dollar fee had been tacked on for the assignment of a personalized
PIN number.
“Hey!”
Franklin Buck shouted. “This is
bullshit! When I signed up you only
asked me for a hundred bucks. And
speaking to the teller? You kidding me?”
He read
on. With twenty-five dollars left in his
account, guards were proactively summoned to haul Franklin
off to debtor’s prison because the twenty-five dollar fee for summoning said
guards would bring his account balance to zero.
Additionally, a seventy-five dollar convenience charge would be tacked
on for each live guard as well as a rental fee for the cell in which he was to
be detained. Meals would result in fees
as well. The statement went on to
document twenty-five dollar overdraft fees which were to be applied to each
charge following the zero balance due to the insufficient funds in the account to
which all charges were being attributed to.
