Sunday, May 01, 2011
The tension just won't let up at work. It's mostly S-hole and Boss clashing, and I'm really torn over who to side with--frankly, they're both being assholes. Honestly, I have more respect for S-hole on a personal level, and more respect for Boss on a professional level.
S-hole would like to cast Boss' latest behavior as unadulterated ass-kissing. It could certainly be interpreted that way. But Boss is a very ambitious person, and he's playing the company politics very well. I figure you can learn from the successful people above you, or you can resent their success.
That said, I'm pretty miffed at Boss, too, because his ambitions are causing more stress on S-hole and I. It's so funny how I take on so much ownership of what goes on in the branch, you'd think I was an assistant manager (eye roll). Boss has been missing a LOT of his normal hours, not taking phone calls when we need him and just generally being unavailable for a couple of months now, and it absolutely leaves us at a disadvantage. I 100% blame our recent cash swap error and each of our smaller drawer outages on his absence. That's not to say that we need him because we can't function without his leadership, what I mean is that he ignores critical staffing needs when he chooses to go off radar. Most of the time, we just need one more BODY available to carry part of the workload, or a manager available with the proper security level authorizations.
This weekend, he did it again. Yet another very busy Friday understaffed because he went to an out-of-state branch to "help" (i.e.: kiss ass). And yes, since the 1st was on a Sunday, that means everybody's SSI came in on Thurs (but they don't believe it and come in on Friday to get it), and everyone who got paid Thurs/Fri came in to buy their money orders (you wouldn't believe the number of people who have bank accounts and still pay all their bills with money orders). S-hole was fuming mad the minute he walked in. I tried to calm him down--I certainly don't blame him for being mad, because big mistakes happen when we're understaffed and under high pressure, and people get fired for big mistakes. But, I pointed out, this is our opportunity to prove to VP that we actually don't NEED HIM here, that we can handle this business just fine without him as an individual. In his haste to volunteer his time, Boss had to leave J and D-rod to close by themselves without anyone with EXPERIENCE to close. Here's the thing: if you have no experience in being in charge to open or close, the safest choice is opening, because any mistakes you make can be fixed when more experienced folks come in later in the day. Closing, though--those mistakes get sealed into the record, carried over, and can actually fuck with people's bank accounts. Closing mistakes can get you fired. And yet we have two inexperienced team members closing on a very high-volume day. Very bad. But S-hole said, "Fuckit. He wants to kiss ass so bad he's willing to sink the rest of the branch, I'm just going to sit back and watch." When our opening shifts were over, S-hole told the guys he'd be available by phone if they had any questions (then whispered to me that he was going home to mow the lawn, so he'd never hear his phone while he was busy with that). I told the guys I'd try to be available, too, but they frankly don't pay me enough to be on call 24/7 and interfere with my family time.
We close on Friday at 8pm. The closing team is supposed to send a group text updating everyone on the number of accounts we got. At 9pm I still hadn't gotten the text. I texted S-hole asking if he'd gotten it yet. He replied that no, he was in the branch trying to help them because the vault was out of balance by forty cents and they couldn't find it. The vault can't be out of balance--it's not like you count change back to a customer incorrectly out of the vault. The transactions out and in are very heavily monitored under dual control, and buying coin from the vault is done in even dollar amounts by the roll. A forty cent outage should be easy to find. It wasn't, and it was hopelessly fucked up.
D-ball and I opened on Saturday expecting the cash balancing report to be off by forty cents. Instead it was off by $309. ????? It took us about 10 minutes to discover that the reason it was off was because D-rod had left a couple of transactions at his drawer station, so they hadn't been processed overnight. That's right: somebody made a deposit that didn't get credited to their account because he left it sitting out all night. *sigh*. They also made a couple of other minor mistakes that I'd fully expected, but all in all, it was just bad, and it was 100% because Boss skipped out on us. I was just glad that the problems didn't have ANYTHING to do with me. (An aside: I also worked today and we just happened to beat our daily account goal by 4x, having an unusually busy Sunday. Hey Boss, give me a raise!!)
On Saturday, Boss emailed me (because he was working at the other branch at the time), and asked me if I wanted to go with him to another branch's anniversary celebration on Friday next week. What a minefield!!! Yes, I want to go, because, as he said, it's a great networking opportunity. Or, as S-hole will see it: a great ass-kissing opportunity. I have NO idea why he chose me. He certainly could have asked S-hole to go with him. Maybe he felt a mgmt staff person should be at the branch since Friday is our busiest day of the week. So it's my advantage, and I'm going to take it. Provided, of course, that VP confirms that the event will be big enough to merit a **3 hour** road trip. Rusty is, BTW, 100% behind my attendance. He knows these things are effective in office politics.
S-hole would like to cast Boss' latest behavior as unadulterated ass-kissing. It could certainly be interpreted that way. But Boss is a very ambitious person, and he's playing the company politics very well. I figure you can learn from the successful people above you, or you can resent their success.
That said, I'm pretty miffed at Boss, too, because his ambitions are causing more stress on S-hole and I. It's so funny how I take on so much ownership of what goes on in the branch, you'd think I was an assistant manager (eye roll). Boss has been missing a LOT of his normal hours, not taking phone calls when we need him and just generally being unavailable for a couple of months now, and it absolutely leaves us at a disadvantage. I 100% blame our recent cash swap error and each of our smaller drawer outages on his absence. That's not to say that we need him because we can't function without his leadership, what I mean is that he ignores critical staffing needs when he chooses to go off radar. Most of the time, we just need one more BODY available to carry part of the workload, or a manager available with the proper security level authorizations.
This weekend, he did it again. Yet another very busy Friday understaffed because he went to an out-of-state branch to "help" (i.e.: kiss ass). And yes, since the 1st was on a Sunday, that means everybody's SSI came in on Thurs (but they don't believe it and come in on Friday to get it), and everyone who got paid Thurs/Fri came in to buy their money orders (you wouldn't believe the number of people who have bank accounts and still pay all their bills with money orders). S-hole was fuming mad the minute he walked in. I tried to calm him down--I certainly don't blame him for being mad, because big mistakes happen when we're understaffed and under high pressure, and people get fired for big mistakes. But, I pointed out, this is our opportunity to prove to VP that we actually don't NEED HIM here, that we can handle this business just fine without him as an individual. In his haste to volunteer his time, Boss had to leave J and D-rod to close by themselves without anyone with EXPERIENCE to close. Here's the thing: if you have no experience in being in charge to open or close, the safest choice is opening, because any mistakes you make can be fixed when more experienced folks come in later in the day. Closing, though--those mistakes get sealed into the record, carried over, and can actually fuck with people's bank accounts. Closing mistakes can get you fired. And yet we have two inexperienced team members closing on a very high-volume day. Very bad. But S-hole said, "Fuckit. He wants to kiss ass so bad he's willing to sink the rest of the branch, I'm just going to sit back and watch." When our opening shifts were over, S-hole told the guys he'd be available by phone if they had any questions (then whispered to me that he was going home to mow the lawn, so he'd never hear his phone while he was busy with that). I told the guys I'd try to be available, too, but they frankly don't pay me enough to be on call 24/7 and interfere with my family time.
We close on Friday at 8pm. The closing team is supposed to send a group text updating everyone on the number of accounts we got. At 9pm I still hadn't gotten the text. I texted S-hole asking if he'd gotten it yet. He replied that no, he was in the branch trying to help them because the vault was out of balance by forty cents and they couldn't find it. The vault can't be out of balance--it's not like you count change back to a customer incorrectly out of the vault. The transactions out and in are very heavily monitored under dual control, and buying coin from the vault is done in even dollar amounts by the roll. A forty cent outage should be easy to find. It wasn't, and it was hopelessly fucked up.
D-ball and I opened on Saturday expecting the cash balancing report to be off by forty cents. Instead it was off by $309. ????? It took us about 10 minutes to discover that the reason it was off was because D-rod had left a couple of transactions at his drawer station, so they hadn't been processed overnight. That's right: somebody made a deposit that didn't get credited to their account because he left it sitting out all night. *sigh*. They also made a couple of other minor mistakes that I'd fully expected, but all in all, it was just bad, and it was 100% because Boss skipped out on us. I was just glad that the problems didn't have ANYTHING to do with me. (An aside: I also worked today and we just happened to beat our daily account goal by 4x, having an unusually busy Sunday. Hey Boss, give me a raise!!)
On Saturday, Boss emailed me (because he was working at the other branch at the time), and asked me if I wanted to go with him to another branch's anniversary celebration on Friday next week. What a minefield!!! Yes, I want to go, because, as he said, it's a great networking opportunity. Or, as S-hole will see it: a great ass-kissing opportunity. I have NO idea why he chose me. He certainly could have asked S-hole to go with him. Maybe he felt a mgmt staff person should be at the branch since Friday is our busiest day of the week. So it's my advantage, and I'm going to take it. Provided, of course, that VP confirms that the event will be big enough to merit a **3 hour** road trip. Rusty is, BTW, 100% behind my attendance. He knows these things are effective in office politics.
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