The Bank
When I left the craft store for the bank, I was sure I was making the right decision. The bank had expressed interest in hiring me years earlier when one of my business classes partnered with them to revamp their customer service. The college dean had spoken highly of me to the bank executives and they were impressed with my presentation skills and extensive customer service experience. I was focused on college at the time and politely refused.
In March of 2020, I felt I had come full circle back to the job I maybe could have had years earlier. I was excited to leave the retail world, though I was unsure how I would feel about not dealing with inventory. I had always loved inventory, aside from the ridiculous hours as a manager, and my craft store was the best in the district for inventory accuracy.
My first week with the bank was in a classroom setting. There were only four of us and we had to sit far apart because of the rapidly increasing COVID-19 numbers. My introduction to banking was not a good one—warnings of putting your family in danger, the possibility of jail time if you screwed up, and an overall feeling of being in the wrong place. The other women in the class were all from banking, whereas I was from retail and had an entirely different viewpoint on everything.
When I interviewed for the bank teller job, I was told that it wouldn’t matter that I had no banking experience. My fifteen years in cash handling and customer service was enough for them and they were excited to bring me on board. What they don’t tell you is that banking is completely different from retail. Where you were praised for speed in retail, you are punished in banking. You are encouraged to be friendly and polite in retail but are expected to think everyone is a crook in banking. Or at least that was my take on it.
Immediately, I missed unloading freight and stocking. Though my knee cannot handle much physical labor anymore, I had always let loose my aggression when unloading a truck at the craft store. Whether ripping into a box, stomping cardboard flat, or tossing a tote of yarn to the side, it was my physical release for the week, letting me purge myself of pent-up aggression, or at least some of it. The bank teller job was far too much sitting for me, and, for the first few weeks, my muscles ached from lack of physical activity, sometimes preventing me from getting a full-night’s sleep.
When I was finished my classroom training and started at the branch, I was unenthused by the teenage atmosphere. The other tellers were young girls into boys and makeup, and I certainly did not fit in with them. Eventually I got to know them more, but I always felt like the adult in a room of children. A couple of weeks later, another teller returned from quarantine—an adult who offered to help me learn the job, something the young girls had never done. We bonded quickly over eighties music and frustration with feeling old among the high school drama.
The job was incredibly boring most of the time. The others were content with playing on their phones, browsing social media between customers. This was still the early days of the pandemic, so the lobby was closed and the bank was drive-thru only. I spent most of my time going through my online training—something the other girls should have also been doing instead of checking Instagram and TikTok.
Aside from the sheer boredom of the job, I found out the pay was not as I was told, meaning our financial stability was in limbo. I had left a job with a decent salary for a pay timeframe that now was not true. I started job hunting during my first week at the branch, but also continued with my training between customers.
Though I knew the job was not the right fit for me, I quickly grew to hate the bank because of employee attitudes over politics and religion. The number of times two of the employees expressed their dislike of all Democrats was disgusting. They would express this to me, thinking I was a Trump supporter. I remember one of them saying she would never speak that way in front of the one teller because she was a Democrat, to which I replied “so am I.” That was meant with a revolting “oh.”
Later, during a Joe Biden ad on the radio, the two Trump supporters expressed disgust over Biden’s views. I laughed and stated that I was still going to vote for him. I had been strongly behind Pete Buttigieg, but when he removed himself from the race, I fully supported Joe Biden. The Trump supporters both looked at me, shocked, and asked why. I replied, “I’m a Democratic Socialist.” Truthfully, I’m not as much as I once was, but I still consider myself to lean that direction. Typical of those who do not understand what that means, I received the response “socialism doesn’t work.” Obviously anyone who uses that response does not actually know what Democratic Socialism is—it’s really not that different from what we have now in the United States, and it seems to work pretty well, when the parties are not trying to undermine each other all the time.
Even executives from the bank’s main office would make appalling political statements when they were at the branch, such as blaming the Pennsylvania governor for the pandemic, or claiming it was a hoax to control the people. The number of times I heard “it’s going to go away after the election” was laughable. I once replied angrily to an executive “it will go away when there’s a vaccine.” We aren’t there yet, but we are certainly closer than we were back then, and even more than we were after the 2020 election. Science doesn’t exist in the mind of Conservative Christians.
The fight against wearing a simple mask was intolerable—the bank lobby remained closed because of the pandemic, yet some executives claimed the virus was “just like the flu.” They would say the governor wanted all businesses to fail while they sat hidden in their offices, away from the public, or working from home to avoid contact with others. It was never about business; it was always about money and greed. It was interesting when one of us was exposed to COVID-19: a mad dash to get that employee out of the branch. So, it existed and was deadly, but yet was a conspiracy and wasn’t dangerous.
Not only was the bank very conservative white, it was also heavily Christian, and I just did not feel that I fit in. When one goes to work for something like a bank, one would not think political and religious views would matter. Not with that bank. Between the Conservative Christian ideals, the implied possible danger to myself and my family, the arrogance of certain customers, and the accusation from other customers who could not do math in their checkbook ledger, I took the first job I could get just to get away from that place. I never regretted it.
