words

Words are a funny thing. Some words have different meanings to different people, and some people make up new terms for everyday things. Take, for instance, last week when I was on the phone with a customer. She kept asking to talk to the person who was in the motor bank. I had no idea what she was talking about! Motor bank?

The only thing I could picture from the term motor bank was an RV in the middle of a parking lot trying to pass as a financial institution. Sorry, but there are no RV's in our parking lot at this time.

And if there were, I'd be a little leery of the money they'd be handing out. For real, sounds sketchy to me.

So I said to her, "I'm not sure what a motor bank is." (This was kind of embarrassing to admit because I work at a bank and you'd think I'd know what a motor bank was.)



So she replied, "You know, the drive thru."

Oooohhhh, the drive thru!

Just for fun, I googled motor bank, and I guess it's an old-fashioned term for the drive up window at a bank. Guess I can add motor bank to my vocabulary now.

Today, I was talking with a customer about using debit cards at the gas station. As I was explaining something to her, I accidentally called the gas pump a gas machine (no wonder, with words like "motor bank" floating around in my head), and was quickly corrected by the customer.

It's a gas pump. This I know.

There are also those fun times when a word means one thing in English, but something else when translated into Spanish.

I don't speak Spanish, but a couple of my coworkers do. One day, one of my bilingual coworkers was explaining to me what she had said while helping a customer. This coworker had been helping a customer go over her transaction history in Spanish, and while she was doing that, she told the customer that she had wasted her money at a few stores.

When she told me what she said to her, I was shocked! I asked, "You really told the lady that she wasted her money?!" My coworker just looked at me with a puzzled expression. She was like, "Yeah, so what?" I stared at her with my mouth open and no words coming out. She had really told a customer they had wasted their money.

Later on I found out that "wasted" in Spanish doesn't have the same meaning in English. It more or less means "spent" or "used." Who knew?

I wonder if motor bank means the same thing in Spanish?

Huh.

the end.