This city has more loyalty programs than actual loyalty. I decided to count mine.

I have banked with HSBC for fifteen years. In that time, according to the welcome emails that land in my inbox with the punctual cheer of a subscription renewal notice, I have been assigned twenty different HSBC relationship managers. Twenty. I could not pick a single one out of a lineup that included my own accountant, my building’s security guard, and a mannequin. Each one arrives with a name and a headshot and a line about how thrilled they are to support my financial journey. Some months later, a new email tells me this person has moved on to an exciting opportunity elsewhere, and I am now being cared for, with the same canned enthusiasm, by somebody else.

I am not a difficult client. I don’t have complicated needs. On the rare occasion I’ve actually needed a human being, usually a wire transfer the app has decided, for reasons known only to itself, requires a phone call, I’ve rung the general hotline and spoken to whoever happened to be sitting closest to it that day. Never once has that person been my relationship manager. Never once has my relationship manager called me. I’ve started to think of them the way I think of buildings I can see from the highway but never actually visit. Technically real. Permanently out of reach.

Here’s the part where a different kind of essay would build to outrage. I’m not going to, because I’ve genuinely made peace with it, the same way you make peace with a coworker whose name you’ve forgotten to ask for so long that asking now would be its own small humiliation. What I actually want is smaller than outrage. I want to walk into the Premier lounge and grab a coffee without someone first checking whether my account qualifies for the coffee. That’s it. A coffee. One transaction where the bank doesn’t interrogate me first.

Then there’s Marco Polo Green (which may be called just Green now), which sounds like a paint swatch and behaves like a small, precise experiment in exactly how little preferential treatment a person will accept gratefully. Green gets me priority boarding, which in practice means I stand in a slightly shorter line, board the plane 30 seconds early, and then sit there as the other passengers file past me at their own pace while I am simply waiting, the earliness having achieved nothing except relocating the boredom from the gate to the seat. I didn’t arrive sooner. I didn’t leave sooner. I got the identical flight everyone else got, plus 30 extra seconds of strapped-in stillness, which is not a benefit so much as a change of scenery for the same wait.

The mall above Pacific Place will validate your parking if you spend enough at the right shops, and this system has, more than once, sent me on an actual errand, buying a scarf I did not want at a store I don’t care about, purely to clear the threshold and save forty Hong Kong dollars on parking. I’ve spent real money to save fake money and felt triumphant walking back to my friend’s car, like I’d pulled something off. 

I told Ruth about it that night, practically proud of myself, and she just kept folding dumplings, pleating each edge with two fingers without looking down at her hands, the way she does when she’s only half listening, and said she’d had the same bank her whole adult life and never met a relationship manager either, that this was simply what banks were. Not something you complain about. Something you dress for. I found that more unsettling than if she’d agreed with me. Fifteen years in, and I still haven’t made her peace.

The Octopus card gives you rebates for tapping in ways engineered to be slightly inconvenient, a few cents back during off-peak hours nobody actually wants to travel in, a small credit at a 7-Eleven that is never the one closest to my building. And then there’s yuu, which somehow talked me into downloading it four years ago and has been quietly stitching together Wellcome and Mannings and IKEA and Pizza Hut into a single coalition of my grocery habits ever since, one point per dollar, tracked with the diligence of a jealous ex. I have, at this point, accumulated enough yuu points to redeem for a set of reusable shopping bags I do not need, a discount on a mattress protector, or a free small fries at KFC that requires a minimum spend to unlock, which is its own small piece of genius, a reward that costs you money to claim. I check the app more than I check my actual bank balance, which feels like it should embarrass me more than it does.

My credit card has been handing me points for a decade that I’ve never redeemed, because every time I check what they’re worth against what I’d have to give up, usually some personal data and thirty minutes reading terms written by someone actively trying to discourage me from finishing the sentence, the math lands in the same place. The bank would rather I feel rewarded than actually be rewarded, and it turns out those cost very different amounts to produce.

I don’t actually want to cancel any of it, and that’s the detail I keep circling back to without quite landing on why. I keep the Premier account. I keep chasing the parking validation with the same low-grade determination I bring to nothing else in my life. I’ll board that 30 seconds early next month and some small, embarrassing part of me will enjoy it anyway. A green lanyard. A shorter line. The mere suggestion of a relationship manager thinking of me, somewhere, between assignments. It was never supposed to be much, and it isn’t, and somehow that’s the part that works.

I still don’t know any of their names, though. Twenty of them. Not one.