When is Barclays bank not exactly Barclays?

This may sound like some kind of cunning Italian trabocchetto, but it ain’t a trick question and it ain’t no laughing matter. Not for me at least. I’ve been trying to keep this under my hat, to keep the lid on my fuming rage but when a letter arrived from my “English” bank yesterday (Barclays Italia), for which I was unnaturally charged, I thought, “Ok, mo’ basta!”. Enough is enough. I’ve got something on my chest and it ain’t my chin. Weighing approximately the same as a packet of sugar, it contained reams of indecipherable nonsense in ridiculous smallprint and arcaic Italian about various terms and conditions about debitori and creditori, all in the name of Italian transparenza. Fifteen pages of stuff that means nothing to no-one and that no-one is actually meant to read but all designed to cover their backsides when you happen to complain that you’re been overcharged for something silly. “No, no, guardi,” they’ll say in that oh-so-friendly way as your butt cheeks instinctively clench, “we sent you all the terms and conditions for your account. It’s here on page 14, point 3b, plain as the nose on your face.” And they smugly state that Italian banks have been immune to the crisis – slowly, quietly, sweetly screwing their customers every day of the week helps to boost that immunity no end. Now, you may say that perhaps my Italian isn’t up to it. It is. I’ve given similar letters to students of mine in the past in a desperate attempt to glean some sense but it’s Greek to them too. “Oh, Deep, you’re not supposed to worry about that. No-one actually reads these things, you silly, silly, naïve, darling boy!” “But what if, inbetween all the flowery medieval Italian, it says that the bank manager can now have dinner at your house every Friday and sleep with your wife afterwards?” I protested. “Come on, Deep, non esagerare." The story is long and old so I’ll start at the beginning. Bear with me and sit down. It’s painful. I used to be with Monte dei Paschi di Siena, a nice friendly Italian bank conveniently located under our school where I was always greeted in that intimate Italian way like one of the bleedin’ family. Okay, so I had to pay a few euros every month to have an account which was initially galling but then I just stomached it (along with everything else – don’t go there, not now) because, you know, they were so damn friendly and all. Occasionally I was escorted into an office and told about various investments I could make and on more than one occasion, amid the amiable chit-chat and warm hands on shoulders, I found myself signing five or six sheets of indecipherable smallprint in a grinning daze, high on caffeine. “This clause here that mentions dinner, Friday nights, my wife and the Direttore – what’s that about then?” I was sometimes awake enough to ask. “Oh no, nothing to worry about,” they would say, “ tranquillo.” Tranquillo. Can you feel that tightening sensation around your rectum? Sadly on those occasions I didn’t trust my arse. My investments went tette in su and when I complained that I had lost not only all the interest accumulated over five years but also 30% of my capital and no-one had had the nous to even call me up, my words were met with the oh-so-typical-Italian shrug of the shoulders. Swiftly followed by the extended arms I-relinquish-all-responsibility gesture that's as common as a tooting horn. “We aren’t legally obliged to contact clients until they lose 50% of their investment,” I was told. So I huffed and I pùffed but no houses came down. It'll take more than the words of some unconnected schmuck to break the hold of Italian banks on Italian society. Ever seen any articles in any Italian newspapers criticising the banks? Nope. And why? Err, 'cos the banks own the newspapers, dummy! So I walked out of the bank no longer as a customer, vowing never to have anything to do with Italian banks again. They couldn't have cared less. On my scooter riding home one night, Barclays appeared on the horizon like a mirage in the desert, like a bottle of beer before an alcoholic. Little did I know that appearances can deceive. I went in and my laments were met with knowing nods, compassionate understanding. I've come to the right place. “Here we do things differently, we’re Barclays but you know who we are already, I don’t need to tell you what we’re about.” Relief washed over me like sweet Pugliese primitivo. I should have known better. There was a slight charge for current accounts every month but they threw in a credit card and 50 withdrawals from other banks’ machines a year so I figured it made sense. I bought it, I lapped it all up like dome sap of a religious fanatic because I wanted to believe. I had to believe, goddammit.I slipped my new cashpoint card into my wallet next to my UK Barclays debit card and my Barclaycard – home at last, thank God, I’m home at last. Soon enough, clouds began to gather, a rumble of thunder could be heard in the distance. Within a few weeks, I applied for a €2500 loan to buy a new scooter. It was flatly refused, no explanations. I protested, my complaints were answered with a standard letter addressed to someone called Dear Customer after about 6 weeks. Barclays was beginning to feel a bit more like Baacleis, if you know what I mean. I stomached it, bought the bike with my own savings and figured “Oh well.” I clung on desperately to the belief that my bank was the same bank I'd been with for 20 years. After a month or so, my credit card still hadn’t come through. I waited. I called. I emailed. After 5 months, in a strop of biblical proportions, I told them to stick the card where the sun don’t shine. Yep, exactly there, clenched buttcheeks or not. And now this letter. Exactly the same as any letter from any Italian bank, so long you’d have to take the day off work and employ a legal expert to extract any sense from it. They were so damn sure that I wasn’t going to read it that they even forgot to print page 5 (of 15). You gotta hand it to them. ‘Cos if you don’t, they’ll just take it anyway. Your soul and your savings. So there you go. When is Barclays not Barclays? I don’t mean to interrupt the fervent back-slapping at Barclays for yet another year of record profits, but the answer to the question is palese, clear as crystal: when it’s Barclays Italia. Ma che vuoi fa’? What exactly are you gonna do? There’s not much you can do. Apart from scream to high heaven every time something little happens because your stress threshold is so low and because you quite frankly can’t take it anymore and not because you like complaining but just because you thought Italy was a first world country and of course if I was living in India I wouldn’t complain about the inexplicable blackouts and the state of the roads because that would be ridiculous but here it’s just a non-stop rollercoaster ride of incazzature and ohhhhhhh, okay, give me some tits and arse on telly and let’s go to the beach and crack open some beers.