safe deposit boxes in Austrian vs Swiss banks

In Switzerland, the safe room tends to have the feel of a nuclear bunker.  It's one or two levels down, and there's a thick steel or concrete door.  In Austria, it tends to just be in a partitioned room.

In Switzerland, in several banks, they seem to think it's part of the service to lift your box down each time you visit.  Then, when it's heavy (gold is dense), they nearly drop it, or otherwise seem to struggle.  Some of the boxes are above head height.  If you offer to take it down, they will accept, but by default they will try to lift the box down.  It's a problem even with the smallest box, which is the size of a ream of B4 paper.  Gold is 19 times denser than water.  In Austria, they are apparently not allowed, by law, to lift the box down for the customer.

The vocab is all over the place.  I've seen them called Tresorfach, Schliessfach, Safe, etc.

There are bank-by-bank variations on how access is authorised.  The best ones have a simple sheet of paper, and you sign it with the date on every visit, and you can check it when you like.  In at least one Austrian bank this sheet is called a "Zutrittsformular".

Authorising another person to visit it was called "Zutrittsberechtigt" in that same place.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

the persistent idiocy of "privileged ports" on Unix

google is giving more and more 500 errors

7 minute workout: a straightforward audio recording (and two broken google web sites)