Sign your name... and again... and again...

One of the most remarkable - and cumulatively irritating - things about the Chinese bank experience is the amount of paperwork involved.

Cancelling my lost bank card and ordering a replacement last week took getting on for 15 minutes. That was at least four times as long as it had taken me to withdraw half the money in the account! And at the end of all that, I was required to sign four separate forms - all of them in duplicate, triplicate, or quadruplicate. (No kidding! At least they were carbon copies.) That's in addition to the rather complicated form I'd had to fill in to request this 'transaction' at the outset. And on every one of these five forms, I seemed to have to sign in a different place. Even if I could recognise the relevant Chinese characters for 'Sign here' or whatever, it would be pretty difficult to distinguish them amid such a morass of other unknown characters on these Chinese-only forms (few, if any, of the banks here seem to provide any dual-language forms as yet).

And on top of all that, I was repeatedly called upon during this protracted procedure to key in my PIN at the counter - presumably to confirm that I was still present and supervising the clerk's activities. I wasn't asked to confirm or assent to any particular action (maybe the poor clerk just thought this would be too difficult to try to explain to me?); but then again, this didn't seem to be just a passage-of-time security requirement. Sometimes I would be called upon to enter my PIN again within a minute or thirty seconds, but then I might be left unbothered for several minutes. At times I was asked for the PIN just once; at others, I had to enter it twice - and once, thrice - in quick succession. I lost count, but I think I must have keyed in the PIN a total of at least 15 times, over some 10 or more separate occasions.

And you know what, I bet most of those forms were in a wastebasket by the end of the day. This is not the way to save the forests, people.