Changes At the Bank
Shortly after the Amanda-Zach incident, my boss Cathleen, and the Senior Vice President called me into the office. They wanted to ask if I would be willing to be part of the manager’s weekend rotation.
The rule was that everyone was supposed to work one Saturday a month. It was only a three hour shift and we got off at noon. When I was a teller it was overtime pay and I didn’t complain if I had worked more than one. As it was I came in for a few minutes every Saturday to update the Internet Banking website to get Friday’s transactions up in a timely manner. Now they wanted me to open the branch on a Saturday once a month. I agreed. It pretty much meant that after I unlocked the door, I would sit in my office and surf the web until one of the tellers needed cash out of the vault.
After a few months of this, they asked me to move my Saturday shift to a different branch than the one I worked at. The branch I did work at was the main branch that had more employees as it was where we had most of the banks operations. However at this other branch, they had less employees and there were only 3 managers, which meant they would have to work more Saturdays than others.
I had agreed, although I was quite nervous as I was unfamiliar with some of the people who worked there. In the end it wasn’t that bad at all. There was one girl that worked there named Angela who was really sweet and around my age. We hit it off really well and spent most of the time just talking. It really made working at a different branch a lot easier and I actually looked forward to it when we had the same Saturday shifts.
Now, after Eric was let go from the bank, Cathleen hired a girl named Leslie to replace him in the wire transfer department. Cathleen really liked her, but I found her to be a horrible, gross person. There was nothing about this woman I found likable. She was a single mom that had 6 kids with 5 different fathers and insisted that none of them were an accident and that she wanted that many kids. She pretty much told us that each kid put more money in her pocket. It seemed to be true, because for Christmas, she went to town with all the Christmas gifts she bought for the kids and stored at work.
On top of that, she was untrustworthy in work related matters. When I asked if she had done something, she said she had. All records would indicate that she did not. Then I would be forced to verify something she claimed that she had done, find out it was not done only to have her say “I didn’t know how to do it.”
I may be wrong, but “I didn’t know how to do it” is not the same as “I did it.” We worked at a bank and we deal with people’s money. If somebody sends money to himself to another bank, he will know it didn’t get there. We took the money out of his account. Now he is asking about it. Leslie says she sent it. I check with Cathleen, who balances our account with the Federal Reserve. I asked her if the account was out of balance. She said it wasn’t, but we didn’t think she was even caught up with balancing that account. We thought she was a month or two behind. In the end… she never did it.
On top of that, shortly after Christmas, it came to our intention that Leslie, while working in the wire department was rerouting social security payments that were coming in to people that had passed away into her own account. The lowest of low. Anyway, everyone in the branch found out because Dick couldn’t yell at her any louder telling her how horrible of a person she must be to steal money from dead people.
Dick wanted to know why we didn’t catch it earlier and Cathleen said because she had too much responsibility. Enough that Dick, the Senior Vice President re-aligned manager duties to have Alan manage the back room operations, Cathleen manage IT, and we brought on Kimberly, whom used to work at the bank but left to raise kids, back in Alan’s old position managing the Teller line under Gary.
Kimberly had a tendency to rub people the wrong way, enough so that Amanda and Claudia ended up quitting after a couple of months. Of course, Kim wasn’t the only reason. Amanda was going back to school, and Claudia had a second baby, but because Kim wasn’t Alan did play a factor. In the beginning, Kimberly and I hadn’t really hit it off either. It turned out that she was intimidated by me. I just got the impression that she didn’t like me which was why she never talked to me or even make direct eye contact.
To replace Amanda and Claudia on the teller line, we brought in a girl named Annette whom transferred from another branch and a guy named Mathis that recently moved from North Carolina. Mathis and I got along very well teasing each other about me being a Yankee and him being a Southerner.
Although things were changing at the bank, we were all still very close.