Saturday

Around 7:30 last Monday morning, in the midst my daily wake-up ritual of reading in bed, my Nook let out a little “Ping!” That’s when I knew I was back in the 21^st century.

For nearly two weeks, I’ve been in residence at the Akademia Sztuk Pięknych, or Academy of Fine Arts, in Wroclaw, Poland. It’s the third time I’ve lived here while teaching a three-week intensive at the University of Lower Silesia. Living at the art school is always a bit funky. There are no kitchen facilities, not even a refrigerator, requiring strategic meal planning. I apparently share a bathroom with a phantom who appears only to take late-night showers. The halls are populated by ghostly life-size sculptures, most of them nudes. While my garret (La vie boheme, w Polsce, Oct. 8, 2010)  is comfortable, it’s a bit like “high-end camping,”  as my China colleague Pamela Britnell once described foreign teachers’ housing in Xiangtan (Ever so humble, March 3, 2010). Actually, it’s much higher-end.

One reason I requested my same garret this year was the fact that the wifi – or VEE-fee, as it’s pronounced in Europe — works in my room, even though it’s supposed to work only in selected public areas. I suspect the thing outside my dormer window that looks a bit like an old-time TV antenna may be the wireless router. (If it’s a TV antenna, it’s not doing much good.) My laptop remembered the password and connected immediately upon my return. Imagine my surprise, then, when I returned from class last Friday night to find I couldn’t connect – not on my laptop, not on my web-equipped Nook, not on the old iPod Touch that my friend Heidi recently gave me, code-named Alvin in honor of our late mutual friend whose picture she used as its wallpaper. He always wanted to visit his ancestral Poland.

An evening without the Internet is hardly a hardship, considering that I lived without it for 40 years.  I settled in to watch “The Tudors,” long since downloaded on iTunes and held in reserve for just such an occasion. True, it was a little frustrating that I couldn’t do one last e-mail check or rush to IMDB.com to check whether Simon Ward, Henry VIII’s Bishop Gardiner,  was the Simon who played James Bellamy in “Upstairs, Downstairs.” (In fact that was Simon Williams.) But overall it felt like a quiet evening at home in my country childhood, when all there was to do was watch TV until you were ready for bed.

The next morning, I was still disconnected – no WQXR.org to bring me gently back to life. “Nie veefee,” I told Piotr at the front desk on my way out the door. Piotr, whom I know to be a very nice man despite the fact that he speaks no English and I understand little Polish, launched into a long explanation and gestured to indicate “around the corner.” My guess was that the school had turned off the wifi for the weekend, when few people would be there, but he was suggesting that I could connect at a nearby café or, for a fee, at the Radisson Hotel that shares our courtyard. I smiled, nodded and went on my way, still confident that I could live disconnected.

Then why did I pull Alvin out of my bag almost the moment I arrived at school? No matter. Nobody knew the wifi password, and the half-point type on the screen was too small to read anyway. After class I checked e-mail at the library and, in a blow to my ego, found that nobody urgently required my attention. Next I went to the movies and checked Alvin to see if there might be a connection at the cinema cafe; again, nie veefee. I went to dinner at Le Bistrot Parisien, connected there and, again, found nothing of importance. The restaurant where I had lunch on Sunday had no wifi, so afterwards I went to Coffee Planet on the Rynek for a pot of tea I didn’t really need, just to check the connection there. Once again, no urgent messages.

This is an addiction, and we all have it — even I, who don’t even carry a cellphone except when pressed or traveling. Maybe I’ll start when everyone else learns some manners – say, on the day I no longer have to walk down the street with someone six inches behind me screaming into my ear,  wrapped up in a “private” conversation but oblivious to being in public, or when the first notes of a Tanglewood season come from the orchestra, not a ringtone. Text messaging is far less intrusive, unless you happen to be sitting behind a lit screen in a dark theater. Little wonder I chose the most anachronistic ringtone my international phone offered: ”Greensleeves.”

Again I ask: What is so important that we cannot stand to be out of touch for even a moment? Yet I reach for Alvin at every opportunity. It’s become a reflex, much like the way my father used to reach to his shirt pocket for his cigarettes long after he had finally kicked his own addiction, which would nevertheless kill him a few years later. These devices have become  a habit, a pacifier, a shield. Yes, they connect us to the world, but they also they cut us off. Technology has made it too easy, even when we’re on the other side of the world, to read our own newspapers, watch our own TV, play our own music and communicate with our own friends instead of engaging with our surroundings — being present.

This Friday, the wifi had again been turned off by the time I returned from class. Never mind; I was holding a Saturday class at the office and could use the computer there. (I scored: “Venus in Fur” on TDF!) Mere hours after leaving the office, I went by Coffee Planet. This time I didn’t even go inside but sat on a bench just outside to see if the signal traveled that far. It did. What urgent business  awaited me? Just a continuing dialogue about naming a friend’s new cat.

I plan to spend Sunday as unplugged as possible . I’ll go swimming, maybe visit the art museum next door, have dinner with colleagues whom I now, after four years, regard as friends. Maybe I’ll spend some quiet time writing, maybe finish this very piece even though I can’t post it until Monday. In short, I will try to live like a civilized human being, the way people did in the days before a couple  couldn’t even enjoy a leisurely Saturday breakfast together without simultaneously checking their separate e-mails. But surely, somewhere along the way, I’ll reach for Alvin, just in case someone, somewhere, is trying to reach me with a message more important than seeing the charm of the city around me in the golden light of a northern European autumn, and being part of it. When Monday morning brings that “Ping!” I’ll be ready.

Update: I couldn’t connect from the bench outside Coffee Planet on Sunday, but Ula graciously let me check e-mail at her flat. Mea culpa.

I found out I was worthless when my lunch check came back with the message “card declined.”

It was supposed to be a pleasant Sunday afternoon, New York style.  I had a ticket for “Atys,” a four-hour French Baroque opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is some people’s idea of fun. En route I would, as usual on BAM excursions, eat at Junior’s, the temple of New York cheesecake a few blocks away. A bloody mary, shrimp salad on toast, a slice of raspberry swirl to go for intermission – what more could I possibly need to hold me through four hours of French Baroque?

As it turned out, $17 plus tip. The bill came to $28; I had $11 cash on me, and no other card but the debit card linked to my checking account at JP Morgan Chase, which has made thousands of dollars on me in my account’s 23-year history.  

I gave up credit cards almost a decade ago, having learned the hard way just how the credit economy was bleeding me and millions of others. What I paid in interest and fees over the years probably could have bought me the apartment on West 57^th Street that I rented for 10 years, or supported me through almost five years of my current vie de boheme. So I stopped handing the banks any more profit than absolutely necessary. Even so, they hold the purse strings and the power. In America, money is power, and when your money is cut off, you are indeed worthless.

The manager at Junior’s kindly let me go to the Chase branch next door, which looks something like the Supreme Court building, and check my account on the ATM; as collateral, I left behind my slice of raspberry swirl, the only evidence of good faith I could think of. The ATM indicated a negative balance of $192, which made no sense, since my account has a $6,000 credit line. A call to customer service revealed that my account had been blocked, but because it was Sunday, the office that could tell me why was closed. I had never in my life walked out of a restaurant without paying, but now I bolted to BAM, where curtain was 20 minutes away. In the lobby I ran into a friend who handed over $40 in cash, no questions asked. At the first intermission, I ran it back over to Junior’s, paid my bill and ransomed my cheesecake.  Cash in hand: now $17 with the change from my friend’s loan.

On Monday morning, I told my story to one Chase representative after another, most of whom talked down to me as if I were a retarded 5-year-old. It took nearly three hours for the explanation to become clear: while I see my checking/line of credit as one account, Chase sees it as two. (“Don’t they have different account numbers?” a friend asked. In fact they do, but I had to click through several screens to find out, since the accounts share their last six digits.) At some point in the preceding 30 days, I had dipped into my line of credit, and in exchange Chase expected a “monthly payment” of $275 – a figure that showed up nowhere online. In those 30 days I had deposited more than $1,000 in checks, but since I owed Chase nothing when I deposited $800 of those checks, only $200 counted as a payment, leaving me technically delinquent  by $75. All I would have to do, Chase told me, was deposit that $75, and we would be friends again. By that time I had already transferred $1,000  from a money market account elsewhere, but that would take two days to land electronically. Adding insult to injury, when I called a direct number to thank an agent named Anthony who had actually been of help, someone called Corey answered – and simply laughed. I was later told that no one at Chase has direct numbers. Perhaps they do not have direct names, either.

So I had $17 to carry me through 48 hours in New York City. I made a large batch of my mother’s macaroni salad and settled in at my computer to wait it out, as cheaply as possible. 

On Wednesday, Day 4, the $1,000 landed. I took out $100  cash and tested the card on a restaurant check, which added up to just about the amount of a check I had deposited. So far, so good. I told my friend it was now safe to deposit the postdated check I had given her on Sunday to pay back the $40 loan.

Day 5: I woke up to discover a negative balance in my checking account and the credit line still blocked. An e-mail alert – the first I had received, since Chase had apparently been sending alerts to a defunct address, though it knows my current one when it wants me to answer surveys – told me I had incurred more  insufficient funds fees. I called and was told that my account would still be delinquent until a transfer from checking to line of credit posted at 11 p.m. In short, about $800 was in limbo somewhere in Chase’s computer. I could neither use the money nor get it to count for anything, and once again I had a negative balance.  By this time my friend  had deposited the check in her own Chase account, leaving each of us liable to a bounced-check fee of $35. I told her I would pay any charge to her account, but she said, “I’d rather bomb them.” (Another friend with better connections at Chase than mine pulled some strings in the Private Banking division, which was willing to report to her but would not talk to me. At least some fees were reversed.)

On Day 6, the $800 still had not posted to the credit line. By Day 7 it had, but – surprise! — the credit line was still blocked, leaving me with a negative balance of $182 and change. All I had to do, a  “customer service” agent explained, was deposit that much in my account, and all would be right with the world. By chance I was going to deposit two checks that day, adding up to precisely $183.

And that is how a $75 misunderstanding cost me a week of my life.

The most infuriating part was, I had done nothing wrong, except fail to understand Chase’s byzantine system. My anger and powerlessness left me too shaken to think of anything else, let alone do any productive work  – and a freelancer who can’t work doesn’t get paid.  I might have been less worried if I hadn’t been about to leave, on what could easily have been Day 10, for a month’s business trip in Europe when I would be relying on my debit card, which has seen me through years of international travel.

Everyone who has heard my story countered with a similar one — “Wait’ll you hear what they did to me!” — about a bank, a government office, an insurance company. The banks are squeezing consumers already squeezed by a recession caused largely by the banks themselves, which resumed making profits in no time thanks to a government bailout.  Chase now charges me $12 a month for not making at least $500 a month in direct deposits – which I’d be happy do to, except that none of my current employers offer direct deposit. (When I asked a local branch banker about that charge, he began, “Well, you see, in order to maximize profits . . .” before he read my face and realized that was the wrong thing to say.) Much of my income now comes from abroad, and direct deposits from sources like the Abu Dhabi newspaper for which I write and the university where I will teach this winter are classed as foreign transfers — $15 each. And then there are the fees for foreign transactions whenever I travel. (Not to mention that I can no longer earn airline points for debit card purchases, but  that’s the government’s fault.)

When did corporate profits become the driving factor in American life? When did they become more important than the services that businesses were founded to provide? Why do corporations feel  entitled to every penny they can possibly gouge out of consumers? No wonder the Occupy Wall Street protests are spreading across the United States. If I didn’t happen to be in Poland at the moment, paying cash for just about everything, I’d join them.

That lunch at Junior’s has taught me a few lessons. I’ve begun shopping around for a new bank, though the ones I’ve found so far seem no better, and some worse. I now realize I’ve been foolish to put all my eggs in one basket, and at the very least I intend to set up a small account at another bank for emergencies. I’ve developed a phobia about going out to lunch on a Sunday afternoon, and I will never again walk into a restaurant without more than enough cash in hand to cover the bill.