After spending the better part of an hour at Bank of America trying to find out why they can't write a foreign draft for a noncustomer (the banker wanted to know, too), I gave up. After several phone calls to other bank personnel and several attempts at making it up as she went, the banker gave me several semi-plausible excuses, one of them that they couldn't take cash but instead had to debit the amount of the draft from the customer's account and she'd be happy to open an account for me so that I could do just that.
Today I called my sister-in-law, who banks there. She called someone at the branch inside Safeway. I've been under the impression that a grocery-store branch would be much more limited in its services than a full-on bank branch. I was wrong. I went to Safeway, told her who sent me, and she took my cash and gave me a foreign draft in the amount of 700 euros. And, waived the $25 fee. Took about six minutes, four of which were spent trying to figure out how to load the check forms in the new printer.
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