Open Mouth, Insert Foot

To protect the guilty, the name of the perpetrator in this story will be omitted. Okay, I cracked--her name is Alessandra and she works at People's Bank on Farmington Avenue.

Honey and I went to the bank on the way back from dropping off Honey's car for repair (a whole 'nother story). He wanted to ask questions about options for a new account. So we sat down together across from the customer service desk with representative Miss Alessandra. And Honey went into his schpiel (sp?) about how his mother wanted him to open a joint account with her to be used for emergencies and blah, blah, blah.

Alessandra, the brightest coin in the realm, pipes up [I kid you not, Scouts' honor, I swear on a stack of bibles, etc.]:

. . . this is not your mother, right?

We were, as they say in the United Kingdom, "gobsmacked." I felt like someone in a comic strip or cartoon who's just been slammed in the forehead by a rubber dart. I had to grip the chair arms to keep from falling on the floor screaming and choking. And to keep from reaching across the desk and grabbing Alessandra by the neck and squeezing hard for a long, long time.

Well, what our sharpest tool in the shed meant was that Honey's mother had to be there in person to open up a new account. And since she lives seven hours away, obviously that meant that the account wasn't going to get created that day.