ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

I wanted to freaking kill our transfer girl today.

My head teller was gone on a scheduled absense today, and when I got to work my boss said that transfer girl might not be in today. When I asked why, he explained that yesterday she had never come in. Not like a no-call, no-show, but she called and said she was going to be late because she was sick for something like the fourth time this month, and he told her she could just stay home if she wanted to. I would have been tempted to do the same, because like him I am beginning to lose my patience and would prefer not to have to see her.

So she actually did come in today, but she said she still felt sick and all she did all day was complain about it. To adequately illustrate how worthless she was today, I created a helpful pie chart.

“I feel so awful,” she complained. “I feel like I’m going to just die.” This repeated all day, even if it wasn’t directed at me. She told the customers, me, my boss, and from how much time she spent on the phone, she also needed to tell everyone she ever met in her whole life. “I think my immune system is all messed up,” she griped.

Since they’re getting pretty strict about making sure we do courtesy and collection calls now, and upper management wants to ensure that everybody equally participates, I did only half of the courtesy calls this morning, and then asked her if she would prefer to do the rest of the courtesy calls, or do the collection calls. She said she guessed she would do the courtesy calls. I said all right. Two hours passed, and although she had eaten a lunchable, spent a lot of time on the phone, and complained a lot about how much her throat hurt, she hadn’t yet begun. Hint: Maybe if she didn’t talk on the phone all day, her throat would feel better.

So I asked again if she still wanted to do them. Since I didn’t really care either way: she’s the one who’s going to get into trouble if she doesn’t do any, not me. She said yeah, she did. So I made about 80% of the collection calls, and by that time I was finished, my boss was back and it was early-mid afternoon. I figured (correctly, I still assume) that she didn’t have any intention of making the damn calls, so I started them myself. She ignored me the entire time, but as I was finishing up, she said, “Ohh, but I was going to do those,” in this stupid little voice. I was annoyed but told her I figured I’d just do them because she was sick. She seemed to accept that just fine.

She literally spent all day talking on the phone about how terrible she felt and kept saying that the only reason she’d come in at all was that she couldn’t afford to miss the hours, etc, etc. I was frustrated since I ended up swamped with work that wouldn’t have been nearly as overwhelming if she’d done even a little bit of what she was supposed to. For instance, we collected on a lot of returned checks from the banks today, so I was entering debt payments into the computer up in the front of the store. She was also sitting up front talking on the phone, and I was starting to get mad because she was on the phone and wouldn’t help any customers. So it being a Friday at the end of the month, I’d get interrupted by a customer every few minutes, and because she can’t wrap up a phone call in less than two minutes, I’d help the customer rather than make them wait on her to be ready to help. I was too busy today to get into it with her, so I didn’t even bother bringing it up at the time. I’m completely fed up. I pretty much consider her worthless at this point.

So later after my boss had returned, I started back into my collection calls, around mid-late afternoon. I was partway into a kind of tough collection call with a kind old man who had just had his social security benefits cut and we were trying to work out a payment arrangement that could work around his current situation, and she came back and said, “[my name],” in this tone meaning, “We have a bunch of customers up here and need your help now.” I waved her off, and said, “Be up there quick as I can,” and honestly, I wasn’t too worried about it because my boss was up there already and I was on a call. So I was almost done on the phone when she came back again and was trying to get me up there. I waved her off again, because I was still on the phone with my customer and I was getting kind of pissed off that she was bothering me. I didn’t appreciate the subtle reprovement, especially coming from someone who didn’t do anything all day, so when I went up there and saw that only two people were in line, I was seriously irritated. She wants to come fetch me for two customers, when all afternoon she let me help customers so she could talk on the phone, even though I was actually working at the time?

My boss gave me a funny look like, “What’re you doing up here, I thought you were busy,” but didn’t say anything. I helped them finish the two customers, and went back and finished my calls.

Later the manager from a different store came over to bring us a bad debt collection that he made for us so we could put it on this month’s business, and it was a little while before she was supposed to go home. We got pretty busy about that time, and even though it was 20 minutes until she had to go, she was too busy counting down her drawer to help them. Partway through her mini-audit, which to her credit she actually has sort of begun to do on a semi-regular basis, she announced to me that she’d cashed a lady’s check for $0.90 less than it was supposed to be, shorting the customer a small amount. I was in the middle of helping two customers by myself because my boss was busy taking care of stuff with the other manager and getting our deposits made, so I asked if she’d voided it and she said “We’re supposed to void them?”

I impatiently said, “Yeah, void it out and make a note of it” and kept working on my customers. Shortly after that she announced that she was $0.90 over and she took the 90 cents out, closed her drawer and left. Actually she should have logged the overage but I had a brain cramp and didn’t connect the two events for whatever reason and didn’t tell her to do it, so she of course didn’t. My boss came up when he was done with deposits and helped me finish off the rest of the customers, and I told him that I was really upset with her for a couple things she did today.

“What’d she do, other than as little as humanly possible?” he asked.

I related to him her interruptions while I was on the phone with the customer, and finished up by explaining that I wouldn’t have been nearly as angry if I hadn’t helped people all day while she was on the phone. “Then she has the nerve,” I fumed, “to come back there and act like I’m not doing my job because I’m not up there helping her when she gets a whole two customers. Helping customers is her job, so she can kiss my ass if I’m not up there while I’m making collection calls that she refused to do.”

My boss said, “If I’d realized she went back there and said that to you I would have wanted to tear her head off.” It made me feel better that someone else was frustrated. “This hour late every other day stuff has got to stop,” he said.

It turned out that I had to log the overage for her drawer, since we had a void in the computer that documented it and we had to log a corresponding overage. $0.87 was the actual overage amount, so my boss was also angry at her for correcting it for $0.90. In addition to this, she did several loans for dates that didn’t match the checks, and one loan that had no date on the check at all. This was something I’d never actually seen anyone do before. My boss is going to talk with his manager tonight about our problem.

One good thing happened today, though. I got an official commendation from my boss’s manager, for having caught the scam on Tuesday. Apparently he was so impressed with the fraud report I wrote that he told my boss it was exactly how he wanted ALL fraud alerts to be done. Yay! We had a speaker phone call with my boss’s manager today too, and he said great job on the collections, which is nice to hear because of how much I’ve been busting my butt at it. I told him that and added that I had several people who had agreed to come in and pay today or tomorrow, so I could tell it was paying off. He said great, and that if they did, he’d buy my store lunch. I know it’s petty, but I almost wish he wouldn’t. I don’t want our transfer girl to get a reward for stuff she never participated in.