Barclays Bank have officially gone nuts. After this post last week where I pointed out the fairy cakes and chocolate biscuits they were using to flag up their new 4.69% mortgage rate, I went in there this morning to pay in a cheque and was greeted by an enormous turquoise blue sticker on the front door, which says “Hi”. This now beats Sainsbury’s nauseating orange “hello” firmly into second place – and, ironically, these are the two institutions I choose to bank with. Appalling.

Anyway, I went to the instant deposit machine, and ferreted around in my bag for a pen, because if there’s one thing Barclays never have lying about in their branches, its, er, a pen. But as I started to write out the tedious details of my sort code and account number, I saw out of the corner of my eye a pen dispenser. On the pen dispenser was written the following:

Need a pen? Be our guest*

*I’m a great little writer. Your place or my pen dispenser!

It’s not so much the fact that it’s mind-boggingly meaningless, unamusing, grammatically dubious, written in a friendly font and directed towards the kind of people who point and gawp at shiny objects, but more the fact that interest on my money has been used to pay people enormous amounts to come up with it. I nearly switched from Barclays this week, suddenly realising that after years of saving money up to pay tax & VAT bills, I’ve earned virtually no interest. But the barriers to switching banks are just horrendous. Sorting out the direct debits, telling people you work for that your account has changed – and when you find a bank, like the Halifax, which says it’ll sort it all out for you, you then discover that their internet banking service can’t be accessed from Macintosh computers. Brilliant.

So, I’m still with Barclays. But if anyone has an account with them and is sick of earning no interest, and has access to managing their account online, I advise you to open their little-documented e-Savings account which I discovered yesterday. Log in. Click on “Interested in… e-savings” in the left hand menu. Two clicks, and you’ve opened it. 4.14% AER. Instant transfers to and from your current account. I know this is of limited, haha, interest to most of you, but anything we can do to claw some money back out of the bastards is surely a good thing.