So the bank is all mad at me now because I filled up my safety deposit box with ground beef a month ago. They complain that it took almost a week to trace the source of the smell, and ultimately one of the tellers went faint on Friday afternoon and they had to hospitalize her — this in the middle of their biweekly payroll deposit rush. As it turns out, the woman in question had been living with an untreated heart murmur — probably for years. The simple truth is, this teller could have infarcked at any time, and had it happened on the job, the bank would have been on the hook for big-time worker's comp money, instead of the three dollars of smelling salts and subsequent $100 ER consultation that managed to identify the problem before it was
too late. So I don't really see why they're coming at me asking that I reimburse them for their "losses."
And another thing: there's nothing at all in the safety deposit box contract that says I can't load up my drawer with perishable food items. The contract
does say they can't bring in blasting caps and blow
my private box open and look inside. Well, it doesn't say anything about blasting caps — but it makes quite clear that nobody except
me and my approved signatories is authorized to access the contents of my lockbox, by key or any other means. That simple principle is what makes a safety deposit box a safety deposit box, and not just some metal container that some SWAT team can blow to smithereens whenever it wants.
The beef in that box was Grade A Top Choice ground chuck — and, more importantly, it was all I had left of Old Marguerite, the sainted Guernsey heifer that found me when I ran astray of a third-grade field trip and manged to pin my right arm under a boulder in Custer State Park. I survived on the milk of that cow for five days while investigators waited — with thumbs "indisposed" — for my disappearance to ripen into a genuine "Missing Persons" case (
ask 'em to blow up a bank safe, though, and they'll be over in five . . .).
The posse of ranchers who traced Marguerite's fugitive hoofprints to my boulder allowed me to take her home. Over the next twenty years that animal stood by me, steadfast, in more times of trial than I care to recount. The Wife and I shared a glass of her milk at our wedding. And when dear old Marguerite passed away, I only wanted to keep some part of her, some token by which to remember and honor her . . .
What — freeze her, you say? Unthinkable, sir! Marguerite was always overly sensitive to cold. A room temperature treatment was in order, and I wanted my keepsake locked away, protected from the grave-robbers who would track down this animal's reginal meat and sell it to the Fan Club on eBay. And yet, who would have envisioned this ending? Marguerite's charred vestiges scooped out of their (now-penultimate) resting place by a HAZ/MAT team, with samples sent to a lab for testing . . . see if your pathologists, when their analysis is complete, do not step forward and announce not only that Marguerite's meat is disease-free, but that even at a cellular level, there is evidence to suggest that no nobler or more loyal animal ever walked this Earth.
Until that report issues, I await the bank's apology.
