Changes At Work

   A few months after I started dating Christine we had a company-wide meeting at work. The Senior Vice President of the bank pulled us all together and notified us that our small, tight-knit community bank had been sold. To us this was devastating news. Everyone was afraid for their jobs, but he assured us that the plan was to change nothing for the next three years. We all knew better. In business they always say that and then things change.

  Dick, the Senior Vice President, pretty much told me that when the owner sold the bank part of the contract stipulated that the three top management people would be kept under contract for three years and be given a nice retirement package. Because of that we had reason to believe it would be true.

  But like always, things did change and so did the situation. With the current CEO/Owner leaving, all of the Bank Financial reports had to be handled by someone else. Technically, it should have been the bank president, but it was apparent relatively quickly that he was in over his head, so Dick made me handle it. It was a little overwhelming as I really didn’t know what I was looking at. The owner had been using the same report since the 80’s and just expanded on it over the years. Dick wanted me to convert it over to Excel. After I did that, I was in charge of it from then on. Funny how that worked…

  Claudia put in her notice that she was quitting so she could go back to school.

  Now with the Owner leaving, the Bank President moved into his office. He had always been at the other branch and I knew him, but it was quickly apparent that he was clueless about everything. Now I knew why Dick was always so grumpy. He had to pick up the slack.

  In December, we were to submit a budget for the following year. Jerry, the President kept changing it. After we submitted the “Final” budget in December, we submitted five more revised ones well into the next year.

 In the last week of January, after dealing with the budget for the last few months we had another bomb drop on us. My supervisor, Cathleen, the only other IT person at the company was confronted about embezzling well over $130,000 from the bank.

  By the first week of February, I was handling the monthly bank financials, Internet Banking, the IT department and putting up with an inept bank president whom now wanted to change the budget well into the second month of the year, so January’s actual spending didn’t look so bad. I put my foot down.

  I told Dick I wasn’t going to do it. I told him I didn’t get paid enough to put up with all this crap. He tried to quiet me down because Jerry could hear me in the next office. I wanted him to. I pretty much said that the bank needed me a whole lot more than I needed it right now. Quieter, I told Dick that all Jerry was had been a figurehead that hides in his office and play with Google Earth on his computer. That I thought he was a coward that was in way over his head and that I didn’t respect him.

  The next day Jerry came in to my office, gave me a raise and an apology. Based on the raise I got, it enforced my belief that he was a figurehead with no real power, but now he was working on my terms.