Saturday, December 05, 2009
OMG, if work were any worse yesterday, I'm pretty sure I would have just left and never came back! First of all, it was a Friday, which is our busiest day of the week. Next, everyone is scheduled to work on Friday (see previous sentence), yet Boss took the day to meet with a couple other managers to go over paperwork and presentations for their final review with their Regional Manager, District Manager, and Vice President. Clearly he's scared shitless over this, but it irritates me that he'd take all day and not come in when I know that they probably sat at an Applebee's somewhere for about 3 hours and called it a day.
J was the opening supervisor, I was closing. I was also scheduled to do collections calls--this is a new task Boss has assigned us. Every day someone has to dedicate themselves to doing nothing but collections. Right now it takes HOURS, but hopefully with some consistent calling, it'll dwindle down to an hour or so. When I got in at 12:30, J was sitting at her desk and appeared to be doing some of the opening work. This is odd, because I'm usually done with opening work by 11am, unless there was a huge stack of new accounts from the day before. There wasn't. I went to the back and worked on my collections. The security cameras are all right there, so I could see that pretty much all day, J never got up from her desk. She didn't have a drawer (she left that to everyone else), she didn't stand out front handing out flyers, she didn't walk through the store handing out flyers, she didn't hook up the Wii and play guitar hero, which are ALL things we're supposed to do if we're not busy with teller transactions or some other assigned task. And because she wasn't doing any of those things, neither was anybody else. It took me 3.5 hours to call through the whole list. Excruciating. So damned depressing, too. Everyone's got a sob story, and it's a pain to sit and listen to it when you know half of them are lying to you. But I did pretty well, actually contacting a higher percentage than my coworkers had done this week when it was their turn, and getting a higher percentage of promises to come in and pay up. Of course how many of them actually do it is another question. And believe it or not, after making more than 30 calls, only one person got angry and swore at me.
I noticed that J sent a branch-wide email reminding us that we have to fill out our new account cover sheets completely because "I was going through some today and there was information left out! We could get hit if we were audited!" Um, no you dumb bitch--you were going through MY accounts (since I was the only one who opened any the day before) and failed to notice that one of them was just adding a 2nd person to an existing account, which doesn't require a cover sheet at all, and the other one was a new account for an existing customer, which ALSO doesn't require all the info if it didn't change, so SUCK IT MISS SUPERIOR! I've got to stop taking that shit personally. It won't help anything--she's going to criticize me all she can while she still thinks I'm her only competition for the Asst. Mgr position. Did I mention we uncovered another big mistake of hers that hit our score? Luckily it was on the last day of the month, so we're still fresh for this month. But it was a really stupid mistake--she cashed a check for $20 more than the amount it was written for. Seriously, how do you mistake $210 for $230??
But I finished collections just in time to squeeze out some lunch before everyone from the early shift had to leave, and when I got back, all hell started to break loose: our network started going down. Everything was hit and miss. We couldn't pull up anyone's information (our customers are too stupid to know their own account numbers, and even too stupid to carry the account card with them), so we couldn't do half of the transactions peopel were waiting in line to do. Then the money order printer wouldn't communicate with the network and wouldn't print anything (it's the first week of the month, and guess what Dumbass Rednecks use to pay their bills after they've bounced so many checks nobody in town will take a check from them?). Then the branch capture system was down and corporate told us to stop sending all our paperwork. Which is funny, because we get penalized if we don't send them in on time, and now if we miss their email saying when to start, how long do we have before they penalize us again? And what if they still haven't gotten it working by the time we close? Do they think I'm going to sit around by myself and wait?? Customers are getting bitchier by the second because we can't help them. And here it is Friday, the day we usually get the most accounts, and we don't have a single one. Finally, someone asks about opening an account. I go through the first steps to find that she's on Chexsystems and would have to get a Second Chance account--which has a monthly fee. No, she doesn't want to do that. Good luck finding a bank wants you then. I start to get up, but here comes another account. I start him up, no, he's not on Chexsystems, I'm halfway through opening his account when he gives me the check he wants to open his account with. It's for $3996.00. Now to you, this probably doesn't seem alarming. But I have seen enough fraudulent scam checks now to know without a doubt that this check is a scam. I start asking questions. This is a payment, he says, for some work-from-home stuff he's been doing. I look up the routing number. It doesn't exist. No, he's SURE it's a good check, why don't I call the company? Sure, I'll call. He starts digging through his cell phone to find the number, but I can't call a number some stranger has provided, I have to verify it some way. I look up the company on the internet, and find a number that doesn't even come close to matching the number he's given me. Their company directory does not list the the name they've given me. They want me to call the number on the check. I explain that if the check were fraud, the number would of course go to the scammer's voicemail system that will be set up to say the check is good. They are offended. I try something new: I google the phone number they have given me. It comes up with a link that someone has posted somewhere (my company's firewall won't let me open the listing, I can only see the Google result) with a news story about Canadian Secret Shopping scams. I hate to tell you "I told you so, but..." I assuage him a bit and tell him we'll deposit it but put it on hold to protect him from any liability. Yes, it's HIM I'm protecting (wink, wink). Just as he leaves, a third account walks in. It's a current customer who wants to open a 2nd account. In fact, he's one of the customers who I called earlier, who has just gotten into a huge argument with is wife over whose fault their overdraft is, and now they intend to close the joing account and open their own personal accounts. I have to laugh--I know my boss will be thrilled, yet somehow I feel a little dirty for having been involved in a major marital disturbance...
J was the opening supervisor, I was closing. I was also scheduled to do collections calls--this is a new task Boss has assigned us. Every day someone has to dedicate themselves to doing nothing but collections. Right now it takes HOURS, but hopefully with some consistent calling, it'll dwindle down to an hour or so. When I got in at 12:30, J was sitting at her desk and appeared to be doing some of the opening work. This is odd, because I'm usually done with opening work by 11am, unless there was a huge stack of new accounts from the day before. There wasn't. I went to the back and worked on my collections. The security cameras are all right there, so I could see that pretty much all day, J never got up from her desk. She didn't have a drawer (she left that to everyone else), she didn't stand out front handing out flyers, she didn't walk through the store handing out flyers, she didn't hook up the Wii and play guitar hero, which are ALL things we're supposed to do if we're not busy with teller transactions or some other assigned task. And because she wasn't doing any of those things, neither was anybody else. It took me 3.5 hours to call through the whole list. Excruciating. So damned depressing, too. Everyone's got a sob story, and it's a pain to sit and listen to it when you know half of them are lying to you. But I did pretty well, actually contacting a higher percentage than my coworkers had done this week when it was their turn, and getting a higher percentage of promises to come in and pay up. Of course how many of them actually do it is another question. And believe it or not, after making more than 30 calls, only one person got angry and swore at me.
I noticed that J sent a branch-wide email reminding us that we have to fill out our new account cover sheets completely because "I was going through some today and there was information left out! We could get hit if we were audited!" Um, no you dumb bitch--you were going through MY accounts (since I was the only one who opened any the day before) and failed to notice that one of them was just adding a 2nd person to an existing account, which doesn't require a cover sheet at all, and the other one was a new account for an existing customer, which ALSO doesn't require all the info if it didn't change, so SUCK IT MISS SUPERIOR! I've got to stop taking that shit personally. It won't help anything--she's going to criticize me all she can while she still thinks I'm her only competition for the Asst. Mgr position. Did I mention we uncovered another big mistake of hers that hit our score? Luckily it was on the last day of the month, so we're still fresh for this month. But it was a really stupid mistake--she cashed a check for $20 more than the amount it was written for. Seriously, how do you mistake $210 for $230??
But I finished collections just in time to squeeze out some lunch before everyone from the early shift had to leave, and when I got back, all hell started to break loose: our network started going down. Everything was hit and miss. We couldn't pull up anyone's information (our customers are too stupid to know their own account numbers, and even too stupid to carry the account card with them), so we couldn't do half of the transactions peopel were waiting in line to do. Then the money order printer wouldn't communicate with the network and wouldn't print anything (it's the first week of the month, and guess what Dumbass Rednecks use to pay their bills after they've bounced so many checks nobody in town will take a check from them?). Then the branch capture system was down and corporate told us to stop sending all our paperwork. Which is funny, because we get penalized if we don't send them in on time, and now if we miss their email saying when to start, how long do we have before they penalize us again? And what if they still haven't gotten it working by the time we close? Do they think I'm going to sit around by myself and wait?? Customers are getting bitchier by the second because we can't help them. And here it is Friday, the day we usually get the most accounts, and we don't have a single one. Finally, someone asks about opening an account. I go through the first steps to find that she's on Chexsystems and would have to get a Second Chance account--which has a monthly fee. No, she doesn't want to do that. Good luck finding a bank wants you then. I start to get up, but here comes another account. I start him up, no, he's not on Chexsystems, I'm halfway through opening his account when he gives me the check he wants to open his account with. It's for $3996.00. Now to you, this probably doesn't seem alarming. But I have seen enough fraudulent scam checks now to know without a doubt that this check is a scam. I start asking questions. This is a payment, he says, for some work-from-home stuff he's been doing. I look up the routing number. It doesn't exist. No, he's SURE it's a good check, why don't I call the company? Sure, I'll call. He starts digging through his cell phone to find the number, but I can't call a number some stranger has provided, I have to verify it some way. I look up the company on the internet, and find a number that doesn't even come close to matching the number he's given me. Their company directory does not list the the name they've given me. They want me to call the number on the check. I explain that if the check were fraud, the number would of course go to the scammer's voicemail system that will be set up to say the check is good. They are offended. I try something new: I google the phone number they have given me. It comes up with a link that someone has posted somewhere (my company's firewall won't let me open the listing, I can only see the Google result) with a news story about Canadian Secret Shopping scams. I hate to tell you "I told you so, but..." I assuage him a bit and tell him we'll deposit it but put it on hold to protect him from any liability. Yes, it's HIM I'm protecting (wink, wink). Just as he leaves, a third account walks in. It's a current customer who wants to open a 2nd account. In fact, he's one of the customers who I called earlier, who has just gotten into a huge argument with is wife over whose fault their overdraft is, and now they intend to close the joing account and open their own personal accounts. I have to laugh--I know my boss will be thrilled, yet somehow I feel a little dirty for having been involved in a major marital disturbance...
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