Clients Say The Craziest Things

I recently spent a week behind the teller line, as one of our tellers went on vacation and Fiscal United Bank's outright refusal to allow anyone to get any sort of overtime anymore has left us perpetually scrambling to fill out the hours without leaving the bank unmanned. (That teller has had his ankles broken since then to prevent any further leaving of the bank.)

It reminded me why I was so quick to accept a promotion out of the teller position without even fully understanding what a Client Service Representative does (they could have made me clean the roof, I wouldn't have known better; it was simply better than being a teller). Even though I deal with a lot of frustrating questions sitting behind my desk, the frustration of dealing with clients at the teller line makes me crazy.

Chief among my pet peeves is the stigma that the fifty dollar bill suffers from. Clients will often say "don't give me fifties, I always think they are twenties." I learned a trick a while ago that can help differentiate between fifties and twenties; there's numbers all over the front and back of the freakin' bill. Seriously, people, this is Darwinism at work. If you're too stupid to tell the difference between a fifty and a twenty, you can't read at a kindergarten level, and you deserve to be penniless.

There is a certain sort of malaise that sets in after three days of sitting behind the line. You start to forget how to do things that you do every day behind the desk. Eventually, you grow comfortable referring people to the desk for help that you know you yourself would normally be able to do.

I am grateful to be back behind my desk (and so is my back; those chairs do NOTHING to help my chronic back injuries). Now I just have to remember what an IRA is...