The maintenance fee came due every three months, and at that point €12 came out of my bank account. The interval is long enough that surely many people forget to have money in their account on the proper day, at which point the bank earns again.

It was only after I'd left my second Irish bank, and had opened an account at one of the new local branches of a Scottish one, that I began to just really wonder....

I decided to ask.

Frank, at the North Main Street branch of Permanent TSB in Cork city, was entirely gracious and friendly, and brought me into his office and he spoke with me until the logical end of our conversation. Frank asked a few times for my account number, it's true — that's a matter of training, no doubt, and protocol. I finally just told him that I'd stopped using my account, and so the matter was not really germane. He continued to try to help me find out what I wanted to know. And, short of incriminating the company that pays him, he seemed like he was willing to answer any question.

But I really only had one — one that had always made me curious.

Frank said — and I believe him — that in his 19 years on the job, I'd been the first to ask.

The maintenance fee is what a customer pays the bank to maintain an account.