Okay, so I have terrible credit. So what?

I'll tell you what. It means that most banks in the New York metro area won't even give me a checking account. Forget loans. I can't get a bloody checking account, and it's tough to get by without a checking account.

I solved this problem six years ago by tacking my name onto a joint checking account that my then-girlfriend opened at the Bank of East New York. After she moved out a couple of years later, I tried unsuccessfully to open my own account elsewhere—one of the big banks, like Citibank or Chase, that let you do online banking and had ATMs all over the city.

At last I realized that I could probably walk into M&T Bank (which had by then absorbed East New York), state that I had one account there already, and open an individual account without undergoing a credit check. This worked.

Now that █████ and I are married, we've opened a joint checking account and a money market account at Citibank, where she already had her own accounts. Then, a few weeks later, I walked into the branch at Amsterdam and 68th and opened individual accounts for myself that linked to the joint account. I walked out with a box of checks for my very own Citibank checking account.

This was less than a month ago. On Monday I received a familiar letter from Citibank: "We're sorry, Mr. Shunn, but your application for a checking account has been turned down because of the following reasons, blah blah blah."

Sorry, guys. Too late. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, because I've already been using that denied checking account for three weeks. I beat you at your own game, you fuckers. Ha!

Well, █████ and I both did, together.