The other day I went into the actual bank lobby to set up a savings account for the kids. Bank lobbies freak me out. This is possibly because you only see bank lobbies in movies when someone is about to bust in and rob the place.

It didn’t help that they had signs all over about taking off your hat, sunglasses and hoodies.

I sat down with a lovely young woman who immediately started helping me out. The process took forever. I watched her deal with an extremely slow computer running an old version of Internet Explorer.  I read some brochures.  I texted my husband.  I bit my nails.

“Are those your kitties?” I asked, finally making small talk. She glanced at the photo on her desk.

“They’re like my babies,” she gushed. “Do you have cats?”

No, but I have terminal foot in mouth syndrome. For example, I answered:

“I did! But I had to give them away.”

She stopped typing and stared at me mournfully.

“Well—I mean,” I stumbled. “I was pregnant and my husband was traveling all the time and no one could clean the litter and they were tearing up the carpets where were rent so I took them to a no-kill shelter—”

“You took them to a shelter?” she squeaked.

“Well. A really nice one. And… I cried a lot?” I offered. (True story.)

Despite my grievous offense against kitty-kind (which, by the way, still haunts me since I totally did love my cats of six years very much) the bank lady continued to be nice to me. She even offered me a job in the bank teller department out of sympathy for my woeful financial being.

“Oh, I can’t add,” I said.

She laughed. I think she thought I was joking.

Then she told me she was from Egypt, and remembering the Kitty Incident, I kept an entire story in my head. I’m so proud. But I’ll share it with you:

When I lived in Gainesville, my friend told me about a magical bikini waxer. The magical wax woman had a tiny office containing nothing but a waxing table and equipment. All day long, every day, she waxed the young women of the University of Florida. Hundreds and hundreds of vaginas kept clean and smooth thanks to her skills.

I visited her, and she told me about learning to wax as a young girl thanks to a religious law against shaving. Her mother taught her how to wax, and she taught her daughter how to wax.

The magical waxing woman not only waxed me efficiently and almost-painlessly, she even got out a magnifying glass and tweezers to catch the strays.

I wondered if my Egyptian bank lady waxed herself.

But instead I just smiled and said, “Oh, that’s neat!”