Bankers' hours were no joke. Nine in the morning to three in the afternoon, Monday through Friday, and that was it. You could make a deposit by mail, but a withdrawal meant going down in person to beg a helping of your own damn money.

And they took every single holiday, from Sadie Hawkins Day to the Feast of Saint Swithins. Worse than the Registry of Motor Vehicles.

Looking back, our attitude toward customer service seems so peculiar. It was years more before it dawned on some banker that offering longer hours and more conveniences would give him a competitive edge. And customers — we grumbled among ourselves, but it's not like you could change anything. It would be wrong to expect more. Suck it up. Deal with it. What are you, some kind of crybaby lacypants wussyface?

Thank goodness there are countless civic-minded crybaby lacypants wussyfaces out there today, whining and complaining for better services on my behalf. So I don't have to. Sissies of America, I salute you.

But I digress.

If you ran out of cash at six in the evening — or worse, Mammon help you, over a long weekend — you were screwed. You either carried around more cash than you should, or you begged somebody to cash your check. Or went without.

My mother taught me, always make friends at the nearest liquor store. They were open late, they had bags of cash, and they were happy to cover a check if they knew you.

Cashing checks was an issue for me because, after an acrimonious divorce, my father insisted on sending child support checks directly to me. From the age of nine, I had a bank account and bills. I had cash-flow issues before I had a training bra. As a result of this important early exposure, I have grown up to be the most fiscally stupid adult I know.

I didn't make cashing a check any easier by using a name even more eccentric than the one I was born with. One of my brothers was a III and one was a V and I was seriously bent out of shape because my name didn't have a number. So I had S. Weasel 1st printed on my checks. For years and years afterwards, I got mail addressed to Weaselist (sounds like an especially distasteful fetish).

I don't even know if it was legal for me to go into a liquor store, but, bless 'em, they always cashed my check. Of course they did. I was a sour-faced little girl with a checkbook and a preposterous name in a liquor store. Wouldn't you?

ATM's were a giant improvement. But the early ones were a little limited. They were only located at the actual bank - at your actual bank, there was no cooperation between different banks. They weren't wired to each other via modem for quite some time. As of this writing, it's only been a few years that ATM's have begun appearing in bank "branch offices" inside larger supermarkets, and even more recently that small portable(!) ones have appeared in convenience stores.

The very earliest ATMs weren't even wired to the banks they were in - what you got was basically a cash loan, because the machine didn't know your actual balance. Hence, not everyone was was qualified to receive a card at first.

Obviously, until they were wired together, you couldn't check balances or anything. Let alone use someone else's cash machine. They sucked up deposits and spit out withdrawals, and that was it.

And yet — this is several years before the Personal Computer, mind — this was mind-blowing tech. You put a card into a slot! You tap in a your own personal secret code! You tell it how much you want! Money comes out! Never mind that tangible cash is an idea so antiquated it might as well dispense cowry shells or goats. This was the future!

I got a rush of that old feeling a couple of years ago. I put the card in an ATM in a grocery store in South London one night. And it spit out real British queenbacks, deducted from my account in Boston.

Lookit, Ma! I'm Buck Rogers!