I used to work in a bank (between 1988 and 1998). I wasn't very good at it though, because I didn't like selling stuff to people, and that was a big part of the job then. One of the best ways to avoid selling stuff was to do admin and that's why between 1990 and 1991 I worked in Bradford in a place called the Customer Service Centre.
It should really have been called the Customer Misnomer Centre, because we tried really hard not to let any customers in. It was basically an admin centre that allowed us to do loads of mundane work centrally, like setting up standing orders and bouncing cheques and it meant they would need less staff in branches.
Although we used to speak to customers on the phone, they weren't supposed to get in. We did once get a stray one in the reception area, and no-one knew what to do with him. It was ages before someone asked him what he wanted and then politely and firmly ushered him out of the door.
We had TQM in those days, short for Total Quality Management. One of its core principles was that no-one was ever to blame. If something went wrong, it was a fault in the process rather than in the person who made the mistake.
Well, so much for that theory! The reality was somewhat different. We worked in a big open plan office, there were about 40 of us in total. And we all had individual badge card numbers. If there was a cock-up it could easily be traced back to your badge card. The manager and his assistant didn't come and find you if you made a mistake, they just opened the office door and yelled out your badge card number. This was followed by the walk of shame across the office, and then as you disappeared into their office the door would be slammed behind you and the blinds drawn. The door got slammed so much in those days that the door frame was coming out of the wall. If it wasn't your turn, you could see it get looser every time it got slammed.
One of the jobs I used to do at the CSC was to manually redirect direct debits intended for accounts that had been closed when small branches had been shut down. This wasn't in any way the customer's fault as they hadn't had any say in having their account number changed by us. In time, the bank put a technological fix in place for this and the original account numbers were retained after branch closures, but this was the early 90s. We were still using Casio calculators then with green numbers on.
The first of the month was always the heaviest workload for direct debits as that was when Prudential amongst others took their payments out. Anyway, one first of the month I decided that the originators of the direct debits would get the message more clearly about having to use the new account numbers if we just bounced all of that month's direct debits on the closed branches. There were about 120 in total.
I hadn't really foreseen the full consequences of my actions, but I had set off a chain reaction. One of the direct debits I bounced was the mobile phone payment of one of TSB's very important commercial customer's and pretty soon his business mobile had been cut off.
With the benefit of hindsight, I probably shouldn't have said when asked about this 'Yeah well, we bounced all of the closed branches direct debits that day'. I think the manager got a bit high pitched when he said 'What do you mean all of them?'.
Every time we bounced a direct debit we had to write it on a sheet and he asked me to go find the sheets. You could fit about 20 to a sheet and I'd filled pages of them. I remember he kept turning the pages over and over in disbelief.
It was okay though, because I'd told my supervisor what I was doing, and she was pretty gung ho and thought it was all a really good idea, like most ideas that you have in the heat of the moment, so after they'd finished with me, she got a pasting as well, but even more so, because she wasn't a young thing like me, and also a supervisor and so she should have known better!
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