Send Money

Our first day here, only hours off the plane, we were at the bank to create our Swiss bank account. Peter, our account specialist, sat down with us to discuss the possibilities. After 30 minutes of signing that we had signed that we initialed that we signed, our new account was days away from creation. Upon leaving the bank we asked Peter if we could withdrawal some money from our US account upon which he indicated that THIS bank branch did not have any cash (that’s some kind of bank – a bank without CASH!).

Two days later we received a notice in the mail that indicated that we would have to visit the post office to receive some registered mail. Our trek to the post office resulted in a package containing the first of THREE registered posts over the next week: one with our bank card, one with our super-double-top-secret pass code, and one with our ‘e-banking card reader’ (which is a glorified calculator with some special features).

Tonight, Robert sat down with the banking trio of paperwork and devices to activate our account. After reading the instructions (in English) for over 20 minutes he thought he had it figured out: log into the web site, insert the e-banking card in the calculator, enter the (super-double-top-secret pass code) PIN number, enter a number from the bank web site into the calculator, enter the resulting number from the web site…easy! Each of us start humming the theme song from Mission Impossible – this seemingly easy process has turned into a crazy maze of passwords and codes. Half way through the process, Robert puts the calculator in front of him and it turns off – losing the code number. Ack! Redoing the process results in a successful login, now we can see how much the bank has put into our account just to get us started. One thousand, one million, one billion dollars – what’s a couple dollars between friends? Our wonderfully, fabulous Swiss bank account contains (drum roll, please) NEGATIVE 20.00 Swiss Francs.