Stupid things people have actually said to you.

[JOE SOAP]

But Roger, Mr Tordelback was asking for you specifically. He's heard you're good.

and he uses Fairy Liquid.

[Roger Godpleton]

All of my nemeses are in one place. Time for a lemon party. I shall be elsewhere, playing some sort of videogame.

[Modern Panther]

From my manager whilst working in an understaffed office of a large highstreet bank:

"Try to be less helpful with the customers...if your nice to them, they just keep coming back".

Left the banking industry soon after.

[Greg M.]

From my manager whilst working in an understaffed office of a large highstreet bank:

"Try to be less helpful with the customers...if your nice to them, they just keep coming back".

Left the banking industry soon after.

Getting flashbacks to 'The Incredibles now: "Are you saying we shouldn't help our customers?" - "The law requires that I answer 'No'."

[TordelBack]

In fairness to your former manager, it has been explicit banking policy to discourage walk-in customers since at least the late 80's (when I briefly worked in a bank, and our manager exploded into a spittle-flecked red-faced profanity-spouting rage when he learnt that counter staff hadn't been charging commission to little old ladies for putting their change jars through the coin sorter: "if it doesn't cost them, they'll keep doing it!"*.  Depositing their money in his bank, he meant).


*EDIT: I should have added that the manager accused one poor young cashier of theft for this - by not charging commission, she was stealing from the bank, and he'd a good mind to call the police.   This during one of his after-hours motivation sessions, where he lined us all up and shouted at us.  I didn't like working in a bank very much

[House of Usher]

- "We want you to create a process quality measurement tool."
- "What is a 'process quality measurement tool'?"
- "We don't know. We want you to research it, find out what one is, and create one."
- "How do you know you want one if you don't know what one is?"

- "And we want you to do it all in three months."
- "But when I was hired, the project was timetabled to run for ten months."
- "We've spent too much of the budget already. We've only got enough left for four months now."

[JayzusB.Christ]

*EDIT: I should have added that the manager accused one poor young cashier of theft for this - by not charging commission, she was stealing from the bank, and he'd a good mind to call the police.   This during one of his after-hours motivation sessions, where he lined us all up and shouted at us.  I didn't like working in a bank very much

Bastard motherfucker.  Now I've got past my 'angry young man' stage, I think I can say with reasonable objectivity that banks truly are the enemy of the people (including the decent staff who work for them).  What bank was it?  Because if it was the AIB or the Ulster Bank, and probably the Bank of Ireland if it's ever proven, it's a bit rich talking about stealing when time and time again their 'higher-ups' (hierarchically if not morally) have been caught doing exactly that and not getting punished. 
Not to mention throwing an entire country's next two or three generations into debt out of stupidity and greed.

[Modern Panther]

I had the privilege of working with a variety of characters who should never have been trusted with other peoples money, such as the sales manager who called me a "hippy" for refusing to commit fraud by falsifying a signature on a loan contract, or the senior director who insisted that thethat the whole financial crash crash happened for "mysterios reasons and no one is to blame".

My personal favorite was in about 2008, on the day when the banks shareprice fell through the floor, there were rumours of a takeover, customers were calling and literally screaming that they wanted to move their money, and an office filled with hundreds of fairly low paid staff are just waiting to be told to clear their desks.  Suddenly, every computer in the office beeps as an email arrives...its marked as urgent and its from the department head...the office holds its collective breath as we prepare ourselves...

Will staff please ensure that coats are hung in the cloakroom and not on the back of their chairs.  This is a serious health and safety issue, and any breaches will be dealt with severely.

[A.Cow]

I'm reminded of an article from the 1990s, pointing out the subtle symbolism of UK bank logos at the time:

• Barclays - talon-clawed eagle/vulture
• NatWest - swastika
• Lloyds Bank - highwayman's horse, rearing up to trample you
• Midland Bank (HSBC) - griffon, pincers out and ready to pounce
• Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) - crushing arrows

[JayzusB.Christ]

And people worry about the eye on the pyramid.  It's the non-secret societies that control our destinies / fuck us over.

[TordelBack]

Because if it was the AIB or the Ulster Bank, and probably the Bank of Ireland if it's ever proven, it's a bit rich talking about stealing when time and time again their 'higher-ups' (hierarchically if not morally) have been caught doing exactly that and not getting punished. 

It was indeed AIB.  As I'm sure I've said on here before, I've never seen staff treated the way I saw them treated in AIB, not in busy restaurant kitchens, not on building sites, not in contract cleaning.  For, I suspect, the simple reason that anywhere else the manager would have been greeted with two fingers and a rapidly-turned heel as the staff headed for either the shop-steward or the door.  But in the banks, you kept your head down and your mouth shut and a wonderful job for life was supposedly yours.

My experience was however way back in the late '80s, and I worked briefly in 3 branches (I was holiday relief) and while none were overly pleasant, I witnessed the real awfulness in only one.  The offending branch was supposedly the most profitable one in the group at the time. 

My old man worked in the banks for 42 years* (not as a manager, I hasten to add for fear of the sins of the father being visited on the son) and he tells some even more incredible stories of stupidity.  My favourite of his was when there was a push on for the bank to sell life insurance/assurance policies in the mid-90s.

As my Dad puts it, their manager insisted that every time they saw a customer, every time they answered the phone, they had to push life insurance on them, whether it was suitable or not - and when that dried up they were told to cold-call all their customers and push again.  Every passing stranger and their dog were flogged life insurance, by folk whose financial advice they were supposed to trust**. 

Eventually, the branch my Dad was in recorded the highest level of policy sales in the country, and there were bonuses and celebrations and so forth.  The very next year, the branch recorded the lowest increase in new life insurance policy sales.  Now, a normal person might have an inkling of just why that was.  But not the bank.  The same staff who had been feted for their comprehensive zeal were hauled in and reprimanded for laziness.   



*How I got the holiday relief job, my one and only foray into the wonderful world of nepotism. 

**Which immorality has subsequently been the subject of several investigations and compensation programmes.

[House of Usher]

As my Dad puts it, their manager insisted that every time they saw a customer, every time they answered the phone, they had to push life insurance on them, whether it was suitable or not - and when that dried up they were told to cold-call all their customers and push again.

I had a stupid boss who was a university professor. He commissioned a long and poorly designed questionnaire (he specified the content) to be completed by 'businesses,' notwithstanding the fact that a business is not a person, and the data you get back will vary depending upon which of the business's 30 senior employees answers the questions. A postal survey was sent to every business in an entire industry, which ran into triple figures. Double figures of completed surveys were returned, about 4% of the sample. He insisted we telephone each company, then email them, then telephone them again to increase the response rate. This met with limited success but he insisted we carry on with the exercize for two whole years. Finally he took his results, based on a 5% response rate, around the international conference circuit, on expenses.

[JayzusB.Christ]

The very next year, the branch recorded the lowest increase in new life insurance policy sales.  Now, a normal person might have an inkling of just why that was.  But not the bank.  The same staff who had been feted for their comprehensive zeal were hauled in and reprimanded for laziness.   

Jesus wept, the mind boggles.  Glad to hear about the investigations and compensations though - one of the few positives arising from the crisis in Ireland is that people now recognise the enemy for what they are.

As I said, people if people stopped looking for the Illuminati / lizards from space / Keen Ark*, and look instead to the real evil conspiracies that unfold in plain view.

*That one doesn't exist outside of my imagination yet, I merely lucid-dreamed that I joined it while I was half-asleep and hungover. I may yet found it and control the world.

[Mikey]

I saw this and thought of this thread;

"While unemployment rises and work dissolves into boundaryless insecurity the language of 'employability' is now all-pervasive, colonising culture and media and threatening to take the place of scholarship in higher education. This emphasis upon individual employability heralds a compulsory curriculum of entrepreneurial self-promotion, generic adaptability and Apprentice-style competitive teamworking.

This talk will approach employability not as a positive, empowering goal, as its proponents suggest, but as an oppressive ideological term which serves to institutionalise precarity and intensify the biopolitical duties of 'jobseeking', subsuming all intellectual life to the demands of the flexible labour 'marketplace'. In current circumstances it is more urgent than ever to meet this discourse not with enthusiasm or acquiescence but with scepticism and hostility."

Ivor Southwood, what is doing a seminar Mrs Mikey is going to tomorrow.

M.

[WhitBloke]

Mikey, thanks for that.  I needed a non-fiction fix and intrigued by that post, I bimbled about on the web for a bit to acquaint myself with Ivor Southwood and have just ordered his Non-Stop Inertia book.  Which, most fitfully from the info I've seen, I intend to read at work.