In due course she shipped out to İstanbul, persuading me to let her take my account with her. There then ensued a dismal period when I had to make occasional visits to Esenler just to check how the funds were holding up. When she moved on again, I decided to see reason and repatriate my account to Cappadocia. Only then did I discover that most banks only move accounts on (or before -- I’ve forgotten the details) a certain date in the month. But when that date arrived it was December and bankers were in a tizzy over the impending end of the financial year. Of course my account couldn’t be moved at such an inconvenient moment. So several months passed before finally my savings found their way back to Ürgüp.Meanwhile by some miracle we had acquired a bank of our own in Göreme and most of us rushed to open accounts there too, partly for convenience but partly because we didn’t want to lose our only urban facility. But you know how it is -- the thought of attempting to transfer things like standing orders from an account at one bank to another at another bank sounded far too potentially problematic. Surely they would get lost in the process and I would find my utilities cut off? It was the same logic that means that almost no one ever changes banks in the UK even after suffering the most abysmal service.
But then this week a routine Google search found itself rerouted to a message from TTNET telling me that I had been cut off because of an outstanding debt. How could that possibly be, I fumed, when I paid my bill by standing order? To find the answer involved a hot, sweaty dolmuş ride to Ürgüp, which might not have been so bad were it not for the fact that the service only runs once every two hours. That means you arrive in Ürgüp with a maximum 25 minutes to rush through whatever business brought you there before catching the same service back again. Miss it and you’re looking at almost two hours spent twiddling your thumbs in a café.
At TTNET they informed me that a payment from the middle of last year had not been made and had clocked up almost the same amount in interest owed. At the bank they told me that it was my fault since on the day that the payment should have been made my account had been empty. True enough as it turns out, but given that there was oodles of cash sitting in another account there I was not easily mollified.
Back in Göreme there was no choice but to wait in line for a whole hotel-full of staff to draw out their wages. Then the security guard helped me fill out the requisite paperwork to move my standing orders. The process seemed disconcertingly simple. I’m just crossing my fingers that the screen won’t go blank again next week.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
