Days of a Kuwaiti Bank Teller

It’s official. The new trainee is turning my hair grey! It isn’t enough that she acts like Miss-Know-It-All when this is her first job and hasn’t had any prior experience. If you think the job takes such little skill to perform then why are you making all these mistakes? That, in a nutshell, is the part that is vexing me. It’s her attitude. If she didn’t flaunt how perfect she was then her numerous mistakes wouldn’t stand out as much. Everyone starts new and we all make mistakes. It’s how we learn and how we grow.

Today we received communications from our Head Branch with her name on it. It was a photocopy of a cheque with a circle around the place where the beneficiary’s name is. KD5,000 was transferred to an account without a name on the cheque! When confronted with this she claimed that there had been a name written on the cheque when she cashed the funds. Was it written in invisible ink? Did it disappear overnight at the Head Branch? We had difficulty in tracking down the guy who’d signed the cheque but finally we sorted it out. We got him in the branch and had him sign a paper stating the funds had been transferred to the correct person.

In the beginning of your ‘career’ you don’t want to make a mistake that can cost you KD5,000! How long will that take you to pay off? Contrary to popular belief the bank does not pay for our mistakes. The moment you sit on that counter you have to take an extraordinary amount of responsibility. You have to be up for it. If not, I advise you to get off the counter because you shouldn’t have control over people’s money. 

I am not happy that I have to clean up all her mistakes but I have to because anything she does badly reflects upon me, the branch, and the bank. I am not happy that she continues to blaze on with utter disregard of the terrible consquences that her actions are capable of. People like this sometimes don’t learn until they’re burnt but I sincerely don’t wish that upon her. Why can’t she slow down and be more careful?

Summer is a lazy time for banks because most people are out of the country. We have less customers, thus less stress. Ramadan is right around the corner to continue our lazy streak. Lack of customers equals lack of stories for me to recite. My current obsession is turning our latest batch of summer trainees into grade A tellers. I don’t know what’s happened to the bank’s training program but it’s not doing an effective job.

It seems like a lifetime ago I was crammed in a small cold room with 20 other individuals being tutored by a high-strung Egyptian woman.

Smile!

Eye contact!

You must egreet ze customer with Saba7 elKheir!

You must use ze customer’s name!

These days countless trainees arrive at my branch without any knowledge of the basics of customer service. Is summer making them lazy or do they really not care? When you go to a branch what would you expect as far as customer service is concerned?