There are some things you come to expect from your family and from your hometown. When I go home to Riverside, for example, I expect that my grandmother will complain incessantly about her gardener, but she'll never fire him. My grandmother has employed this gardener for the better part of 20 years, and not once have I ever heard her express pleasure with his work. He broke the sprinklers; he said he fixed the leak, but he didn't, he overcharged her for this and that...My grandmother, mind you, is not one of those cranky old ladies who does nothing but sit around and bitch all day. She's a firecracker, and the mantra of her life is "Keep a happy heart." She writes it on almost every card and letter she sends me, and reminds me of it every time we talk on the phone. So when my grandmother complains that her gardener is doing a lousy job, I take it to mean that her gardener is doing a lousy job. And although she's threatened to fire him, she never does. What makes even less sense to me, though, is that about five years after my grandmother hired this particular gardener (and began her two decades of complaining about him), my parents hired him, too. I must have been about thirteen at the time, and even then, I remember thinking, "Why?" And sure enough, soon my parents started expressing dissatisfaction with his work. "I told him it was too early to prune the roses, but he did anyway," was my mother's first complaint. It's not clear to me what my parents expected from this man.

Another expectation that I have from Riverside is that the service at Farmer Boys' will leave much to be desired. It's one of a handful of restaurants within a mile of my parents' house, and while it's a chain, it's not a super-huge chain, and it cooks food to order. When you're in the mood for a quick meal, when your other options are Del Taco and Jack in the Box, you can see how the sandwiches at Farmer Boys' are awfully appealing. Unfortunately, the service is terrible, but like my grandmother's gardener, we can't seem to stop giving this restaurant our money. When my girlfriends from high school fill out those ridiculous "high school" surveys on myspace (okay, I'm guilty of the occasional myspace bulletin, too), when the question about "off-campus lunch" comes up, they all seem to mention Farmer Boys' as our most frequented restaurant. My father and his friends also enjoy meeting there for breakfast on weekend mornings, despite that their orders constantly get mixed up, and that the staff always seems cranky. My dad's best friend once even got into a shouting match with the cashier over something ridiculous. The last time my mom and I went there, they forgot part of our order, but after so many years, we'd come to expect it, and weren't really bothered by it.

But something happened recently that has me both delighted and concerned. I'd gone home to visit last weekend With my work schedule, "weekends" consist of Thursdays and Fridays, which doesn't bode too well for my social schedule, but works great for running errands, like, say, closing checking accounts, which was my mission last Friday. I'd opened a checking account at this particular bank while I was still going to junior college in Riverside, and thought that having a bank that was open on Saturdays would be quite convenient. It was a small bank, with branches only in Riverside, but I liked the personal attention I got. The tellers knew my name, and always asked how school or work was going, until I started going to school in Orange County. By this time, the bank had been bought out by a slightly larger bank and no longer had "Saturday hours," so I was forced to ask my sister to make deposits for me. They were always a little suspicious of my sister, since her ID didn't identify her as Victoria Pepper, but they never could figure out the harm in letting her deposit money in my account.

I was growing frustrated with ATM fees charged not only by the machine, but also by this bank, when something much more inconvenient than lack of omnipresence happened. After my roommate moved to Oklahoma with a girl he'd met on myspace less than six months prior, I was forced to find a new apartment. I found a super-cheap apartment on craigslist and wanted to secure it right away. But the landlord would accept money orders or cash only for the $650 deposit. Since I couldn't withdraw more than $200 a day from the ATM, I'd have to go to one of the branches to withdraw the money in person. I thought I'd just go online and find out where the nearest branch was, and hope there was one near the valley. I found the website for this bank, and to my horror, saw that it was ENTIRELY IN SPANISH.

Needless to say, I neither speak nor read Spanish.

I called the local Riverside branch, and asked (in English) if they had any branches in LA, specifically, in the Valley. The nearest one was in San Fernando. My boss graciously allowed me the time off of work to make the trip up there, where, as you can probably guess, I was the only white person in sight. When I arrived at the bank, the signs were all in Spanish, and the teller was talking to the only other customer there in Spanish. Fortunately, when she saw me, she figured she'd better speak in English. I made the withdrawal, put the deposit down, and decided that it was probably time to take advantage of Washington Mutual's free checking accounts. I opened one in July.

Since then, I've been holding two checking and two savings accounts, and last weekend, I decided that it was time to only keep one checking account. I arrived at the Riverside branch, prepared to be given an argument as to why I should keep my checking account. Sure enough, when I explained that I spent a lot of time in LA, which didn't have a lot of this bank's branches, I was told, "We have a lot of branches in LA."

Clearly, this was not a woman who's ever had to live in Los Angeles. Four or five branches in LA does not constitute "a lot." When the nearest branch is twenty miles away, and takes an hour to get there, looking at other options makes a lot of sense. But I tempered the blow by reminding her that I'd be keeping my savings account there.

Following this, it was time to eat, and I was prepared for lousy service but nice, fresh food at Farmer Boys.' You can only imagine my shock and surprise when the cashiers were more than cordial, my order was correct and complete, the waitress volunteered to refill my drink, twice asked if everything was all right, and before I could throw away my trash, a waiter offered to take care of it for me. In telling my story to my parents, recalled similar recent experiences. It seems that Farmer Boys' has stepped up to the plate.

So now I'm wondering if maybe my grandmother will be getting a new gardener.