Bank: a place that lends you money if you can prove you don't need it. Bob Hope

Banker: someone who lends you an umbrella when the sun is shining, then wants it back when it starts to rain. Mark Twain

Ah, yes...the banking institution. Is there any other business calling that so inspires our contempt? Well, Colombian drug lords maybe - but at least drug dealers have the decency to get shot, stabbed, strangled or stomped to death by their rivals once in a while. Bankers rake in the same kind of profits without ever besmirching their French cuffs.

Take Gord Nixon, CEO of the Royal Bank. I don't know how Gord's making ends meet lately, but the figures are in for 2006 and that was a rather good year for Gord.

He pulled down just a little under $13 million for his efforts in that twelve-month period. He must have worked extra hard. He only made $10.3 million the year before.

Mind you, it's not as if Gord was swiping money from the till. Royal Bank made a grotesquely bloated profit of $4.7 billion in 2006. You read right - four point seven.

With a 'b'.

It is temptingly easy to dismiss bankers as 21st century pirates in pinstripes - The James Gang without the charisma - but that wouldn't explain State Bank and Trust in Fargo, North Dakota.

Oh, State Bank and Trust makes money hand over fist too. But then...something unusual happens.

Last December, for instance, each and every employee at the bank - and there are 500 people who work there - got a Christmas bonus of $1,000.

But it's a bank, right? So naturally, there was a catch - some 'fine print', as it were.

The employees weren't allowed to take their free grand and go out and blow it on a five-star restaurant, a shop-til-you-drop blitzkrieg at the local mall or a down payment on a tank of regular unleaded for the family Chevy, no. Nor could they just, err...put the money in the bank. They had to unload it.

"There are three rules," explained Michael Solberg, State Banks Chief Operating Officer. "You can't give it to your family. You can't give it to a coworker.

And you have to document your deed. Other than that, the sky's the limit."

Quite a challenge. And one that the Fargo State bank employees rose to admirably. One teller paid his thousand dollars to a North Dakota veterinary surgeon who performed a life-saving operation on an abandoned, dying kitten.

Another employee went out and bought enough DVDs and DVD players to outfit patients in a local cancer ward.

Having a thousand bucks to play with isn't exactly like winning The Jokers Wild Lottery but, judiciously applied, it's enough of a cash transfusion to put someone's temporarily hijacked life back on the rails. One bank worker turned his money over to a friend whose car had just been stolen. Another donated it to a young, recently widowed woman who was struggling to make mortgage payments and to cover her husband's funeral bills.

In short, the money was applied 500 different ways, bringing unexpectedly happy endings to 500 different, difficult situations.

And that was just the beginning.

The various good deeds the employees did with their relayed nest eggs rebounded back on them. Turned out that by physically giving it away, they made themselves happier too - much more than simply writing a cheque to a charity would have. One employee explained, "You actually, truly see the benefit better by doing it yourself." And it becomes personal. A bank secretary said, "(The money) actually gets to the people that we know in the community who need it."

But I think another State Bank and Trust employee said it best. When a reporter asked one of the clerks what she and her colleagues got out of the exercise, she replied: "Just a real good feeling of giving."

That's something that Gord Nixon can't buy. Not even with $12.8 million.