I have the pleasure of working with some clients who are based in Mexico.  The only reason I’m working with them is because they are targeting the US market.  I won’t work with people located half-way across the world, although some do ask.  I think in order to consult on marketing, you need to know something about the target audience, so it would seem silly to me to work with clients in countries I’ve never even been to, but that’s a different story.

My Mexican clients were going to send me a check in payment for our services.  I called my bank and was told that the check should be written for dollars, it would be cleared here for the amount I was owed, then the Mexican bank would do the conversion and charge my client’s account for that amount in pesos.  Seemed like a simple enough process.

So, the next time I went to make a deposit, I pulled into the drive-through, said hello to the voice coming through the tin can (at least that’s how it sounds), slipped the deposit into the little capsule and sent it on its way into the bank.

The teller contacted me on the squawk box saying that she suggested I take the deposit into the bank.  So, I drove around to the front door, popped in to the bank and was soon talking to an inside teller.  She looked the check over and just wasn’t sure that it could be deposited.  When run through the little machine that reads the encoding, the computer informed her that it was a suspicious check.

I didn’t see the manager I normally deal with, of course, but another manager came to see what was happening.  At the same time, the teller placed a call to someone who supposedly knew something about foreign checks and was, of course, put on hold. 

The manager was surprised that the check wasn’t “clearing through a US bank”.  Why, I wondered, would that be?  If I wrote a check to someone in Mexico, it wouldn’t be clearing through a Mexican bank. 

There was also consternation because the check was written in Spanish.  Rather than saying “dollars” on the amount line, it was written “dolares”.  Now, I realize that is a foreign language, but even if you knew no Spanish…  And, after all, if they’d written it in English, then it would just confound the tellers in the Mexican bank on its return trip.

And, no where on the check did it say US dollars.  Hmmm.  Do you have any idea how many countries use a “dollar” as currency?  I was surprised to learn there were so many: 

• Australian dollar · Bahamian dollar · Barbadian dollar · Belize dollar · Bermudian dollar · Brunei dollar · Canadian dollar · Cayman Islands dollar · Cook Islands dollar · East Caribbean dollar · Fijian dollar · Guyanese dollar · Hong Kong dollar · Jamaican dollar · Kiribatian dollar · Liberian dollar · Namibian dollar · New Zealand dollar · Samoan tala · Singapore dollar · Solomon Islands dollar · Surinamese dollar · New Taiwan dollar · Trinidad and Tobago dollar · United States dollar · Zimbabwean dollar

So, I guess the bank was afraid that someone in Mexico wrote a check in Spanish which was paid on a Mexican bank, then mailed it to someone in the US, but really wanted the check paid in Zimbabwean dollars.  Or something to that effect.

But, then the teller informed us that according to the experts, any check written in a foreign language had to be cleared through the other bank before it would be credited to my account, and that would take six weeks.

Six weeks???  Are they going to put the check on a burro and turn it loose?  Do they not have phone and data lines that stretch into Mexico?  Ah, well.

I think the next time I get one of those “please help us get all these millions from some foreign country into the US”, I’ll just write back and tell them that giving them my checking account number won’t do any good because my bank doesn’t seem to accept foreign checks unless they’re written on a US bank.