German "screw you" customer service finds me in China

Because we don't yet have a Chinese ATM or credit card, I have to withdraw and walk around with fairly large amounts of cash. This means making the rounds to different ATMs to withdraw our daily limit so I have a stockpile for bigger purchases (like electricity to run our AC now that it's getting hot). I didn't have anything to do today and I knew there was a Deutschebank China headquarters here in Beijing, so I looked it up, printed it out in Chinese and handed it to our driver.

So far so good, we found the beautiful high rise "Deutschebank" building, but I wasn't sure where the ATM was. I saw a customer service desk with two women behind it. The Chinese woman was on the phone and the other western looking woman with a very German name was "busy" looking at a clipboard and wouldn't look up at me. Flashback to Germany where this was the norm and you'd dare not interrupt the "busy" person for fear of the German death crusty. So I stood there politely with Dominic making all kinds of noise in my backpack (she must have been hard of hearing) until the Chinese woman KICKED the German woman. Score one for the Chinese.

We then found the ATM with no problem, but it wouldn't take my Deutschebank ATM card. A woman working for Deutschebank tried to help me, but turns out in true German form DeutscheBANK built this huge beautiful skyscraper, but have no money to give out to it's customers. Nor do they give the people any authority to SERVE it's customers (hence, the German "screw you.") She could physically see my ATM card, looked up the fact that we have kept a fairly significant amount of Euros in Deutschebank, but no one was given the authority to give me our money. Nor could they reissue me a Chinese version of Deutschebank's ATM card to access our money.

Her parting words for me were, "maybe you could contact Deutschebank in Germany and they could help you." Yeah, right lady.

And the obligatory photo to spice up the blog post for my husband: