Dear Neighbor

Dear Wells Fargo:

There’s a man in my neighborhood. I’ll call him Mike. Not sure what his real name is but when he introduced himself to my mother a couple weeks ago as we were making our way to her favorite diner, that’s the name he gave. So Mike it is.

Mike doesn’t have an apartment. He sleeps in doorways and under staircases and occasionally when he’s a had a particularly good day at work, he manages the $35 to cover the cost of a night spent on a cot behind a door that locks (from the inside).

Shortly after you moved into our neighborhood, Mike discovered that your ATM doors are always unlocked and took to tucking himself underneath the counter you provided by the window to store deposit slips and envelopes and tethered pens for those of us who still insist on doing our own math on paper the way our mothers and Dads once did.

It was a pretty good spot for Mike. The brickwork at the base of the window managed to obscure three-quarters of his sleeping torso and the countertop provided safe cover from early morning revelers who occasionally toss themselves at the nearest ATM under a 3AM impulse to score whatever drug it is they most enjoy.

It didn’t take long for you to smell something not quite in compliance with your mission statement and so you did what any mother might do when she really really needs her boy to get up and get out of bed. You ripped the covers off Mike’s bed.

With the counter now permanently removed from this spot, you’ve acknowledged something, I suppose. What, exactly? That hardly anyone thinks to actually fill out a deposit slip these days now that the machines are happy to complete mundane calculations for us without even making us ask? Or that privacy and a good night’s sleep are commodities in this no-free-ride-no-exceptions world we’ve built.

You’re new to this neighborhood. And the rumors of your past bad deeds arrived here months before you did. So I guess I’m wondering how it is that you never considered the bad PR that might come from this.

And don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to imply you care only about the public relations implications of a human interest story such as Mike’s. We know that can’t possibly be the case. After all, Justice Roberts and his ilk have told us on more than one occasion you are a person.

So when will you start behaving like one?

Mike’s still sleeping in his spot most nights. But now he’s just a little more exposed.

And aren’t we all.