Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (53 page)

When you meet somebody at a party they ask, “What do you do?” I bullshit ‘em. I tell ’em anything. Their minds are like a computer. “I’m a CPA.” Oh, he’s gotta make at least eighteen-thousand a year. He’s a success. If I said I was an electrician, they’d think I make nine dollars an hour. If you say, “I’m a janitor”—ooohhh! You get this feeling that you are low. It’s a blow to my ego. Who wants to be a janitor? They even call them maintenance engineers.

I don’t have any interest in furthering myself, but I just can’t see myself doing this the rest of my life. I almost get to the point that I ought be on welfare. I ought to chuck it all and just not do anything. My whole outlook on work is different than it was. I’d be free if I could say I’m a janitor . . . If I could only say, “I’m Tim Devlin and I enjoy what I’m doing!”

I’ve had college training and I’d been in sales almost eight years. I was right off the assembly line: In life you become a success to get ahead; money is the key to judge people by. That was my childhood thing—the big office, the big car, the big house. I was doing as good as I wanted to be. I could have done much better.

I fell in love and thought it was the most beautiful experience in the world. Shortly after I was married I found out that my wife—I’m not blaming her—was interested in money. She was judging me against other people my age. Was I a financial success? I put in long hours. I got this feeling I was just a machine. I felt at the end of the week, Here’s the money. Now do you love me? Am I a better man?

I was selling a photocopy machine for $1,250. My commission was $300. The total value of the machine was $480. I thought, Jesus Christ, there’s something wrong here. If it costs $480, why can’t it be sold for $480—for as small a margin of profit as possible, not for as much profit as possible? I’m looking toward a utopian society, ain’t I? I didn’t feel proud of myself.

I was one of their soldiers. I read the sales manuals. If the customer says this, you say that. Turn him around, get him in the palm of your hand, and —boom!—get him to sign on the dotted line. You give him bullshit. You wiggle, you finagle, you sell yourself, and you get him to sign. Pow! you won a round. The next day is another round. What the hell am I doing? I don’t enjoy it. My marriage is turning sour. I’m making good money. I have a company car. This is what my wife wants, but I feel bad. I begin to question things. It blew the whole marriage.

I never talk about it to anyone. People would think I’m a communist or I’m going crazy. A person that’s making money shouldn’t question the source of it. I always kept it to myself. This was the American Dream. This is what my father was always pounding into my head.

I learned this angle thing from my father. He was always trying for some gimmick to make a lot of money. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life as a tradesman. He was always trying to open up a business or a franchise. He lost every dime he made. He believed in the American Dream. We should examine this dream. If I sell a machine that’s worth $480 for $1,250, is that the American Dream?

When I got divorced it hit me bad. I went through a crisis. I blamed the system, I blamed the country, I blamed God. This is where the nervous breakdown came in. I just didn’t give a shit any more. I didn’t want to see anyone any more. I didn’t want to hear someone tell me, “Yeah, next week I’m gonna get a promotion to district manager.” Big deal. I don’t give a goddamn if he’s gonna be President of the United States. I’m cynical. This is what I’m carrying around with me.

When I was selling, my friends looked up to me. One worked in a bakery. Another was driving a cab and delivering pizza. They were thinking, “Maybe I ought to go into sales.” A salesman! You wear a suit every day, you drive a company car. Now they call them account executives. A CTA bus driver may make more money, but you have a white shirt, a tie . . . My sisters are all married to white-shirts.

A lot of people are considered failures but it’s not their fault. I don’t know exactly what I want to do. I don’t want to go back in the rat race. Will it be the same thing again? I’ve had offers to go back into sales—to be a con artist. But I’ve gotten turned off. I think I missed the boat. If I could do it all over again, I would have gone into the field of mental health, really finding out what makes people tick. I would love to find out why people think it’s important to be a success.

I do want to make it financially. But the only thing open for me would be sales work again. I’m not twenty-one any more. My God, I’d have to start off with maybe a hundred and a quarter a week. That really isn’t any money. That’s just enough to put a roof over your head. If I do apple polishing, I might make assistant manager in ten years—and maybe a lot of titles along the way. I’m afraid that’s the only way open for me now. I guess I could buy stock, get remarried, and be part of what the system’s all about. But I really question the system . . .

 

What I do is say hello to people when they come up to my window. “Can I help?” And transact their business, which amounts to taking money from them and putting it in their account. Or giving them money out of their account. You make sure it’s the right amount, put the deposits on through the machine so it shows on the books, so they know. You don’t really do much. It’s just a service job.

We have a time clock. It’s really terrible. You have a card that you put in the machine and it punches the time that you’ve arrived. If you get there after eight-forty-five, they yell and they scream a lot and say, “Late!” Which I don’t quite understand, because I’ve never felt you should be tied to something like a clock. It’s not that important. If you’re there to start doing business with the people when the bank opens, fine.

I go to my vault, open that, take out my cash, set up my cage, get my stamps set out, and ink my stamp pad. From there on until nine ’ when the bank opens, I sit around and talk to the other girls.

My supervisor yells at me. He’s about fifty, in a position that he doesn’t really enjoy. He’s been there for a long time and hasn’t really advanced that much. He’s supposed to have authority over a lot of things but he hasn’t really kept informed of changes. The girls who work under him don’t really have the proper respect that you think a person in his position would get. In some ways, it’s nice. It’s easier to talk to him. You can ask him a question without getting, “I’m too busy.” Yet you ask a question a lot of times and you don’t get the answer you need. Like he doesn’t listen.

We work right now with the IBM. It’s connected with the main computer bank which has all the information about all the savings accounts. To get any information, we just punch the proper buttons. There are two tellers to a cage and the machine is in between our windows. I don’t like the way the bank is set up. It separates people. People are already separated enough. There are apartment houses where you don’t know anybody else in the building. They object to your going into somebody else’s cage, which is understandable. If the person doesn’t balance, they’ll say, “She was in my cage.” Cages? I’ve wondered about that. It’s not quite like being in prison, but I still feel very locked in.

The person who shares my cage, she’s young, black, and very nice. I like her very much. I have fun with her. She’s originally from the South. She’s a very relaxed type of person. I can be open and not worry I might offend her. I keep telling her she’s a bigot. (Laughs.) And she keeps saying, “There are only three kinds of people I dislike—the Italians, the Polacks, and the Jews.” (Laughs.) I’ll walk up to her and put my hands on her shoulder and she’ll say, “Get your hands off me, white girl, don’t you know you’re not supposed to touch?” It’s nice and relaxed kind of—we sit around and gossip about our boyfriends, which is fun.

A lot of people who work there I don’t know. Never talk to, have no idea who they are. You’re never introduced. I don’t even know who the president of the bank is. I don’t know what he looks like. It’s really funny, because you have to go have okays on certain things. Like we’re only allowed to cash up to a certain amount without having an officer okay it. They’d say, “Go see Mr. Frank.” And I’d say, “Who’s that? Which one? Point him out.” The girl who’s the supervisor for checking kept saying, “You don’t know who he is? You don’t know who he is? He’s the one over there. Remember him? You waited on him.” “Yeah, but I didn’t know what his name was. Nobody ever told me.”

I enjoy talking to people. Once you start getting regular customers, you take your time to talk—which makes the job more enjoyable. It also makes me wonder about people. Some people are out working like every penny counts. Other people, it’s a status thing with them. They really like to talk about it. I had a man the other day who was buying some stock. “Oh well, I’m buying fifty-thousand dollars worth of AT&T, and I’m also investing in . . .” He wouldn’t stop talking. He was trying to impress me: I have money, therefore I’m somebody.

Money doesn’t mean that much to me. To me, it’s not money, it’s just little pieces of paper. It’s not money to me unless
I’m
the one who’s taking the money out or cashing the check. That’s money because it’s mine. Otherwise it doesn’t really mean anything. Somebody asked me, “Doesn’t it bother you, handling all that money all day long?” I said, “It’s not money. I’m a magician. I’ll show you how it works.” So I counted out the paper. I said, “Over here, at this window, it’s nothing. Over there, at that window, it’s money.” If you were gonna think about it every minute: “Oh lookit, here’s five-thousand dollars, wow! Where could I go on five-thousand dollars? Off to Bermuda—” You’d get hung-up and so dissatisfied of having to deal with money that’s not yours, you couldn’t work.

People are always coming in and joking about—“Why don’t you and I get together? I’ll come and take the money and you ring the alarm after I’ve left and say, ‘Oh, I was frightened, I couldn’t do anything.’ ” I say, “It’s not enough.” The amount in my cash drawer isn’t enough. If you’re going to steal, steal at least into the hundreds of thousands. To steal five or ten thousand isn’t worth it.

It’s joked about all the time. Sometimes it’s kidded about if you do have a difference. Maybe I was paying out a hundred dollars and two bills stuck together and I gave him $110 instead. A lot of times people have come back and said, “I think you gave me ten dollars too much.” Like they didn’t want me to get in trouble. “She won’t balance today and here I am sitting with ten dollars she doesn’t have.” It’s really nice to know people are honest. Quite a few are. Anyway, we’re bonded, we’re insured for that. The bank usually has a slush fund for making up differences one way or the other.

I’ve never been held up. We have a foot alarm, one that you just trip with your toe. At the other place, we had a button you push, which was immediately under the counter. Some people, you get funny feeling about. Like I don’t think that’s his passbook, it’s probably stolen. Most of the time you’re never right. (Laughs.)

One of the girls who works here was held up. She just gave the man the money he wanted. (Laughs.) Which is all you can do. She went up to our head teller to get more money. She said, “Mr. Murphy, I was just held up.” He said, “Oh sure, uh huh, ha, ha, ha.” She said, “No, really I was. (Laughs.) He said, ”Ooohhh, you really were, weren’t you?” (Laughs.) Like wow! I don’t think they ever caught the person. She didn’t give him all that money. She just gave him what she had in one part of the drawer and didn’t bother to open the other drawers, where most of that cash was stored.

I really don’t know what I’d do. I don’t think I’d panic too badly. I’d be very nervous and upset, but I’d probably do exactly what the man wanted. If possible, trip the alarm, but that’s not going to do much good. I’d give him the money, especially if he had a gun in his hand or even giving the slight implication . . . Money’s not worth that much. The bank’s insured by the government for things like that, so there’s no real . . . It’d be exciting, I guess.

A lot of younger girls who are coming in now, they get pushed too fast. If you’ve never done it before, it takes time just to realize—you have to stop and think, especially if it’s busy. Here I am doing three different things. I am taking money out of these people’s accounts and putting part of it into checking and he wants part of it back, plus he wants to cash a check, and he asks for a couple of money orders. You got all these things that you have to remember about—that have to be added and subtracted so everything comes out right.

You force yourself into speeding up because you don’t want to make people wait. ’Cause you’re there for one reason, you’re there to serve them. Lots of times there’s somebody you know back there and you want to get rid of these people so you can talk to him. (Laughs.)

In a lot of cases, as far as males, you’re gonna be asked out. Whether you accept or not is something else. I met quite a few people in the bank who I’ve gone out with. Sometimes relationships work out very nicely and you become good friends with these people and it may last for years. My social life is affected by my job, oh sure. A customer coming in and saying, “I’m giving a party next week, would you like to come?”

Some places kind of frown on it. But most of them have no control. One fella I met at the bank, he was from an auditing firm, who I went out with for a short while. He said, “Don’t tell anybody. We’re not supposed to go with anybody from the bank we work for.” That’s weird, for a job to carry over into your private life.

Banks are very much giving into desexualizing the women who work there, by putting uniforms on them. Trying to make everybody look the same. In one way it’s nice, it saves on clothes. In another way, it’s boring. putting on the same thing almost every day is—ech!! Some I’ve seen aren’t too bad, but in some places they’re very tailored and in drab colors. Uptight is the only word I can think of to describe them. The place I worked before, it was a navy-blue suit and it was—blach!! (Laughs.)