I have a simple banking problem. It has to do with Bank of America, where I have two accounts. One of them is a savings account, which I share with my ex-wife. She mistakenly dipped into it last year, but the money has been returned to the account after a long period of befuddlement on my part (“Joint Accounts Be Damned,” March 3, 2011). All I want to do at this point is to shift the money to my checking account with the same bank and close the joint savings account. Or at least to get out of it, thus leaving it to my ex-wife. After a long period of trying to figure out how to do this by electronic mail, I just learned that I must do whatever I want to do by phone.

I hate the phone. Passionately, too. After many attempts to deal with the simple banking problem by phone, I learned that I am hardly up to it. The voices of bank operators on the other side, the many banking codes I must have at my fingertips, and all the pathetic music I have to listen to in the meanwhile drive me crazy. Not to mention all the disconnections that grace all of the above, which must be followed by new calls. As well as new operators. But the phone it is, as I have just been instructed. The American way, as it were.

Which only reminds me of my first contact with Americans. Harvard University, of all places. Forty years ago. I was dumbfounded that many of my fellow students from America were functionally illiterate. Spelling errors. Problems with composition. Conceptual quagmires. Only now it dawns on me that they would prefer the phone to writing, my favorite way to communicate. Not even the electronic mail, with all its insensitivities to functional illiteracy, has changed the way Americans communicate with each other. As well as their banks. Over the years, spelling must have gotten much worse, as well.

And now I have to buttress myself for my next call to Bank of America. I have to collect all the banking codes that may come handy, adjust in advance to all the funny accents I may hear on the other side, and prepare myself mentally for the abominable music I will have to suffer through before my simple banking problem can be addressed. I shudder. The United States of America. The mightiest country in the world. The land of the free, no less. Populated by functional illiterates who cannot manage an old-fashioned letter. Or an electronic-mail message, no matter how poorly concocted, about a simple banking problem. And all I want is to shift the money from one account to another and close the empty account.