Community Events

It seems as if no matter what you will have to attend work related events outside of work. I am referring to work retreats or community events. Sometimes they can be fun. Other times they can be unpleasant and awkward to say the least. Let me tell you about one of my experiences thus far.

I recently just started working at a new branch at the bank. So I had to once again learn the ropes at this office. I started a month before Halloween. This branch of the bank always participates in a local "Trunk or Treat". Seeing how I was new I figured I would volunteer to help out pass candy to the kids and be there and build new relations with the manager and a few other employees. Not only did I volunteer to help out pass candy I took it one step farther...

I mistakenly made the comment "Wouldn't it be great if I got to wear the eagle mascot costume and passed out candy?" Not knowing my manager was in the break room eating lunch. She over heard me and said"Thats a great idea!"What was I to do? I couldn't say no. My manager was already on the phone with the marketing department of the bank making sure the eagle would be ready in time for the trunk or treat. Not only did I have to wear the Eagle costume but I already had the Friday off of the Trunk or Treat. Just to summarize. I had to come in to work on my day off for no pay and wear a giant eagle costume.

The day of the Trunk or Treat had finally arrived and I was dreading it. I put a little Baily's in coffee that morning. It was a warm muggy Friday after noon. I arrived at the Trunk or Treat and there it was. The giant eagle costume. I put it on and was already dying of heat.

As soon as the Trunk or Treat started the kids had already saw me. There were two reactions when the children saw me. It was ether amazement and thrilled or terrified. But I had no idea. I could hardly see out of the thing. I had actually begun to have fun as the kids rushed over to hug me or take a picture with me. It was actually a blast until it began to rain. First it was just a sprinkle, then it poured. I would say I became about 50 pounds heavier after it was all set and done. At that point I had to say goodbye to the eagle costume. I waddled inside and quickly stripped the feathers from my body. It wasn't until I got the eagle off me that I realized I didn't have any shoes. I was stuck to waddle around in the giant yellow claws for the rest of the day. 

I still ended up having a blast and was able to get to know my co-workers better. I also crossed wearing a eagle costume off my bucket list. 

Crazy Old People

During the summer of 2015 I decided to move branches to the main office of my bank. I made this decision because of one reason and one reason only. I was sick of walking into work every Saturday morning hungover . My breath smelled of day old beer. My body smelled of body odor which was hidden with over powering Ralph Lauren cologne. My eyes where bloodshot until I made the holy discovery of eye drops in the employee bathroom. No weekends came at a cost. Looking back at it, I wish I would have stayed. I had to befriend new co-workers and build new relationships with customers.

My first week was going smoothly, I seemed to fit in with all of my new co-workers. I thought I had made the greatest decision until a 2014 dark blue Cadillac with banged up doors and a missing side mirror pulled up to my drive through. In the seat sat a 80-year-old women with short blue-grey hair with black eyes. Her name was Alice Meyer. My co-workers referred to her as "The Devil".

Luckily my new manager just happened to be next to me and grabbed my hand before I could turn my speaker on to greet Alice. "Have you been warned about her?" she said. "No whats wrong with her?" "She's bat shit crazy, come with me." My manager then pulled me into the vault room and made me get $3000 in old one hundred dollars. "You can't give her any new hundreds, she thinks they are fake and that we print them in the basement." she said with a straight face. I chuckled "Are you serious?" To my disbelief it was true. If you gave her any new one hundreds she would throw a fit.

I remember thinking to myself "Okay she's a little crazy but how bad could it be?" It got worst. I filled out a withdraw slip and made her sign it. She seemed friendly to me. I gave her the old hundreds and said "Have a great day" with one of my fake smiles. She looked up at me and spoke for the first time.

"Are you new here?"
"Yes, I just transfered"
"What college are you attending?"
"I'm still in high school I am part of the co-op pro...."

She cut me off, her eyes squinted and she propelled her tongue to the side of her cheek. She said "What kind of bank is this? Now they are letting crack head high schoolers see my personal information? I know who you are you little shit you live on 8th and Birney (I don't) , you're mother killed her sister and you're dad is on his way to prison! I'll have you know Auntie Alice will not play these games with you! You little n*%$er loving piece of shit! I hope you go..."

I turned off the speaker sat there and let her finish her crazy ramble while I nodded with a fake smile. She drove away. What more could I do? Customers in the lobby could over hear our conversation and began questioning the tellers on the front line. I was appalled. I spoke with my manager thinking this behavior was some what normal to them. It was not. 

I walked out of the office that day with confusion. That was not my last encounter with the devil. It only got worse from there!

Smelly Carol

I would honestly say that at least once a month I have a rather negative experience with a customer. This is never due to the fact that I have made a mistake most of the time it is because I follow a procedure correctly. The first upset customer I had ever had to deal with named Carol Mathews. She was the rudest person I had ever met.

At our bank we offer a cash advance for non-customers. For all of you people that don’t know what a cash advance is I will explain.  When you receive a credit card you are able to pull cash off of it. This sounds great and all but there is usually a fee and it creates a interest fee of about 23%. So if you use your credit card to perform a cash advance for $100 it would charge you a $5 fee along with a 23% interest rate. So you would have to pay $128 just to have $100. Sounds pretty stupid to me. But I guess if you are ever put in a situation where you need money fast, a cash advance really could make a difference.

Carol Mathews was large middle-aged smelly women. She wore penguin pajamas and a tattered red shirt. It looked like she had just returned from a dog fight as she strolled into the bank at 3:45PM on a quiet Thursday afternoon. A few of my co-workers mysteriously had to use the restroom or make a personal phone call immerged from the clear door. I had been working at the bank for a month. I had no clue what to expect.

“I can help you right here mam” I said with a fake smile. She approached me. I was suddenly no longer in my cinnamon apple smelling bank I was in the unseeable gravitational field of Carol with a mixture of smells consisting of cat urine and human feces on my nostrils.

“I would like to do a cash advance for $300.” She said as she threw her dirty MasterCard at me. “No problem, I just need your ID card for the transaction.” I said as my eyes began to water. In order to perform a cash advance we need a ID card with current information otherwise we would not be able to perform the transaction. “They all know me here” she replied loudly with her raspy voice.

“I understand that however we need it per bank procedure”

“They do it all the time without”

“Impossible mam we can not continue the transaction without it”

She began digging through her large violet purse. “Here you go” she said as she threw me an expired temporary license from 2005. “Mam, I need a current ID card, this expired in 2005” I said as my eyes began to tear up from the smell. “I NEED TO SPEAK TO YOUR MANAGER NOW” Carol said with anger. My manger came up and told her everything I had just told her. “IM TAKING ALL OF YOU BITCHES TO COURT” Carol proclaimed as she wobbled out of our lobby.

As soon as she was a safe distance away Greg threw me a can of Frebreeze and said “I got you man.” I must have used half a can to neutralize the smell. After the whole confrontation Shelly gave me some advice. “Every time a smelly person comes in put lotion under your nose it usually will give you two extra minutes of freshness.” That wasn’t the last time I would run into Carol Mathews.

Shenanigans!

I think Tommy Lasorda put it best "If you love your job you haven't worked a day in your life". Why not make work fun everyday? If you are going to spend must of your time in an office might as well get a kick out of it. So that’s what my co-workers and I did.......We made it fun. When I first started at the bank it consisted of nine people. The manager May, the team leader Sally, the customer services representative (CSR) Lee and the vault teller Ashley. They were the more important people of the bank that handled everything important in our office.  Now I could go in to detail about their jobs and their roles but at the end of the day they made everything run smoothly. The actual tellers consisted of Greg, Kevin, Brandy, Shelly, and myself.

I honestly don't think I would have made it as a teller if it wasn't for Greg and Kevin. Greg being a 25 year old guy who was simply working two jobs to get by. He was the life of a party in a way he was always singing and dancing around. Kevin was 32 and had been working at the bank for 7 years and deeply hated his job. You would have never know Kevin hated his job so deeply, He greeted our customers with a smile but as soon as they walked out the lobby door he would exclaim "What a douche" or some other rude remark.

Working with Kevin and Greg made the day fly by. One of the many shenanigans we would perform would include any attractive girl that walked through the lobby door. While she was filling out a withdraw or deposit ticket simultaneously you would witness us in a huddle in the back rock-paper-scissoring over who would be lucky enough to wait on her. Rock-paper-scissoring was always the ultimate deciding factor in anything we did. After a few weeks of me warming up to them we started doing more and more shenanigans in the down time we had...

"Meow Game"

This game took place mostly on Fridays between 5pm and 6pm in the drive through. Whoever could say meow the most times to the customer without the customer noticing wins. We wouldn't just bluntly say "meow" that would be silly. We would ease it in to the conversation.

Here’s an example of how the conversation would go:

"Hello, how are you today?"

"Good can a deposit my check into my savings?"

"Sure anything else we can do for you right "meow"?"

"No that’s it"

"Alright just give me one "meow"ment"

(Process Transaction)

"Alright you're all set, have a good day "meow""

"Uh thank you"

Greg was really good at this game due to the fact of his love for the movie Super Troopers from which this shenanigan originated.

"Sticky Note Shelly"

We must have played this one a million times and it would never get old. We would take blank regular sticky notes and place them on Shelly's back with out her noticing. Who ever could get the most before she realized would win. You couldn't just walk up and place it you had to be sneaky or clever about it. "SERIOUSLY" the middle aged Shelly would loudly exclaim every time. My record is six for the record.

“Rubber Band Showdown”

Have you ever watched one of those old-fashioned cowboy movies? If so I am certain you are familiar with duels. We would fashion rubber bands as guns start back-to-back, walk ten steps, turn and face, and try to launch our rubber bands at each other. 9/10 times we would hit each other but every once in a while a wild rubber would go hay-wire and hit someone else.

Should we have been doing the shenanigans at work? Absolutely not. However if we didn’t do all of those stupid little things days would have dragged on and on. We needed to do those shenanigans. Without them work would have been miserable and unbearable. After all shouldn’t you enjoy working?

The reason why I chose this topic is to give readers a taste of my everyday life as a bank teller. Along with an everyday taste I will share stories about the rudest of the rude, the snottiest of the snotty and unbearably oblivious customers I have to deal with on a daily basis.

 Let me start from the beginning, at the end of my Junior year of high school my parents would not stop nagging me about sitting home all day and playing video games or "time wasters" as my father called them. Instead of applying at McDonalds or the ever so popular Taco Bell I took it upon my self to make my senior year of high school the biggest "birdie course" schedule of all time, (fly right through it).

After having heard my dad call my precious video games, "time wasters", for the last time, I went to school the next day and found myself in front of the Co-Op counselors' door. I filled out some paper work and within a week I had already had my first interview. The interview was for a part time teller position at my local bank. I nailed the interview, the bank manager loved me, I walked out of the office and knew with confidence I would be hearing from them soon.

Sure enough at the end of the week the bank called me and I had gotten the job. My class schedule for the first Trimester of my senior year read:

Film Studies          7:45am -   8:55am           M. Reid
Team Sports          9:00am -  10:10am          J. Sowinski
Co-op                  10:15am -  11:20am          E. Clements
Lunch                  11:25am -  11:55am
Co-op                  12:00pm -    1:15pm          E. Clements
Co-op                    1:20pm -    2:30pm          E. Clements

"Sweet!" I said to myself. I started training the soon before school started . I learned more in a week about banking than I had in my entire life.

After a month of working at the bank I realized it was nothing like I expected. It wasn't just some boring office job. I was always on my feet and the people just kept pouring in nonstop all day. Despite the average bank hours, the bank I work at is open 7 days a week. But, luckily, we have a great staff and my co-workers made it fun for me for the most part. We were constantly pranking each other and pushing each other's buttons, and having a good time. It helped the days go by faster. I genuinely enjoyed walking into work everyday

This was my first real job, I wasn't used to dealing with the public, I had no idea how smelly, rude, and just down right mean regular people could be. I constantly wonder to myself if people even realize how rude they are being sometimes.

The customers weren't even the worst part, the money was. We had several small business customers that would come in daily with large cash deposits . The worst was this specific Chinese restaurant. Have you ever smelled old rice and moldy eggs mixed into one fragrance? Hopefully not. Its pretty terrible and I do not recommend it if you can avoid it, which i could not. I don't know where they kept their money all I know is that it smelled awful. A close second for most disgusting stink-money was from some younger ladies in the summer time. They would actually reach into their shirt and pull out  a nasty wad of moist boob-sweat crumpled money and ask it to be deposited. If I was allowed to wear gloves, I would have, every day of the week.

I hope that whoever reads my stories and experiences will be more conscientious when walking through the lobby of their financial institution.