Interaction Experiences

I am having some trouble thinking of parallel experiences in which one experience was bad, and the other was good. I think that my experiences have been much less distinctly tilted one way or another. I can much more easily come up with aspects of my current job, for example, that I like, and aspects that I dislike.

The post says to use aliases, so I’ll try to be vague instead of giving specific names. I work at a bank in Champaign. When I started the job this summer, the bank had just lost all two of its three previous tellers. E (female) has been working at the bank part-time for over a year, B (male) had been hired about a month before me to fill the full-time teller position, and I was hired to fill the other part-time teller position.

I will start with an experience where things went poorly. Our branch is open every day during the week, and just our drive-thru is open on Saturdays. On Saturdays two people have to be at work, because we each only receive half of the vault codes for security reasons, even though it only takes one teller to run the drive-thru. On one of the Saturdays that I had been assigned to work this summer, the other teller I was scheduled to be working with, B, did not show up. I waited until 15 minutes after the drive-thru was supposed to have opened at 8am, and then because the manager was out of town on vacation, I called one of our branch loan officers. The bank’s CEO ended up having to come in to help me get into the vault until the loan officer I had called was able to get to the bank to sit there with me until the drive-thru closed at noon.

B called into the bank at about 9:30 and said he had forgotten to set an alarm, and the loan office had me tell him to just stay home for the day. On top of not showing up on this Saturday, B had already called in sick to work on five separate occasions that summer (several of those being on a Friday). The loan officer spoke with me that morning about the situation, and he was clearly angry that B had not shown up for work. The loan officer mentioned that B had called in sick more days in the 2 1/2 months B had been working at the bank than he had taken as vacation days all year, and said that if the decision was up to him, he would fire B. Apparently the manager was supposed to tell B not to come in on the following Monday, and so the loan officer asked me if I could come in early that day.

B did show up for work on Monday though, and said that the manager never told him not to come in. When K, the manager, got back from vacation on Tuesday, he told me that I would have to work fewer hours later that week because of the hours I came in early on Monday. He then told B that B could work extra hours that week if he wanted to so that he could make up his hours for “missing Saturday.” Unfortunately, the buddy-buddy system between B and the manager K was not just noticeable on this day, but is evident most days that I am at work. This is problem with a type of ‘clique’ feel happening at my workplace. This incident also occurred because of B’s lack of commitment to work. All-in-all, this situation is very frustrating because the other teller and I frequently feel that we are treated unfairly.

I have had very good experience, though, working with the other teller, E. We are both good about helping the other person when they get busy as opposed to only working on ‘our work’. The way we are able to share work fairly to get things accomplished makes both our work and personal relationship go very smoothly. This has a lot to do with E’s personality, because she is a very friendly and open person, which makes her easy to get along with, and with her commitment to the work, because it causes her to care about getting things done regardless of who’s ‘job’ it is to do the task.