a bank to cash a check or fill out a deposit slip.
Although most banks went to the trouble of attaching their pens to their desks with little chains, the pens still were always missing, which concerned me greatly. How can an institution be trusted to watch over my money when it couldn’t even keep people from stealing its pens in broad daylight?
The woman handed me the test and directed me to a small room. Inside the room was one chair and one desk.
“Complete the test and bring it back to me,” said the woman.
I went into the room and sat down in the chair. Then I realized I didn’t have a pen. There wasn’t one on the desk, either. I was certain someone had stolen it.
I walked back outside and asked the woman, “Do you have a pen?”
“I’ve got one here somewhere,” she said, beginning a search of the top of her desk. Failing there, she began to pull out desk drawers. She didn’t find a pen there, either. Finally, she went to her purse. No pen.
“Let me ask Mr. Gleegenhammer, the personnel director, if he has one,” she said.
A few minutes later, the woman returned with a pen.
“It’s the only one Mr. Gleegenhammer has,” she informed me. “Be certain to return it when you’re finished with your test.”
I thought to myself, If I really wanted to make a lot of money in my life, what I would do is sell pens to banks.
Instantly recalling my previous experience in the exciting field of sales, however, I took the pen and went to work on the test.
It was a pretty easy test. On the left side of the test, I found a number. Let’s say the number was 314. On the right, I found five numbers. Let’s say they were, 11, 478, 6, 925, 314, and 9. The idea was to circle the number in the right series of numbers that was the same as the one on the left.
My test score was perfect. Why had I wasted my time studying algebra? I could have aced the test with the mathematical knowledge I received playing with my counting blocks when I was four.
“You did quite well on your test,” the woman said. (You mean people come in here who don’t?)
“Give me my pen back,” said Mr. Gleegenhammer as soon as I had sat down in the chair in front of his desk. The next thing he said was, “We currently have an opening in our loan-payment department. It pays sixty dollars a week.”
“Hmm,” I said to myself. “Banking apparently doesn’t pay as well as the exciting field of sales.” But banking also didn’t involve hoofing it around some neighborhood getting doors slammed in your face.
“I’ll take it,” I told Mr. Gleegenhammer.
“Fine,” he replied, “Report to the loan-payment department in the morning at eight and see Mr. Killingsworth.”
I thought about asking, “What will I be doing in the loan-payment department?” but it wouldn’t have mattered. It was obviously inside work with no heavy lifting involved, and if that idiot test was an example of the mental prowess it would take to work in the loanpayment department, I figured by eight-thirty the next morning I’d be able to perform any task put before me. I might even make vice president. Mr. Gleegenhammer hadn’t asked if I had wanted temporary or permanent employment, so I hadn’t volunteered such information. A couple of weeks before classes started at Georgia, I’d simply announce I had been thinking it over, that banking just wasn’t my pot of glue, and that I had decided to go to college and study journalism. What could they do to me? Put something bad on my permanent record? Ronnie Jenkins had been caught smoking in the boys’ bathroom about a thousand times, and that fact had been put on his permanent record, but Ronnie had got a job at a bank, too, so banks apparently had very little interest in permanent records.
I’ll get my duties in the loan-payment department over in a hurry: Customers who borrowed money from the First National Bank of Atlanta—and I would find there were many such people—received loan-payment books, made up of computer cards.
You know these cards. Do not fold, staple, or mutilate these cards. There is a reason the bank doesn’t want you to do that. I’ll get to why later.
Each loan-payment card had the amount of the monthly installment printed on it. The idea was for customers to send in their loan-payment cards with a check for the exact amount shown on the card. Me and a guy named Harvey, who had zits and a beard made up of three hairs, would open the envelopes with the cards and checks inside them. We would put the checks into one pile and the cards in the other. We would make several stacks, called “runs,” of checks and cards.
We would then add each stack of checks on an adding machine. We would do the same with the cards. In a perfect world, the total of the checks would be the exact total of the cards.
But this is an imperfect world, and that is what made working in the loan-payment department of the First National Bank of Atlanta a frustrating experience.
Dingbat customers, whom I came to hate, would have a payment of, say, $19.99 per month. And they would say to themselves, “I’ll make it easy for Lewis and Harvey down at the bank and make my check out for an even twenty.”
So I would add the stack of checks, and it would be one cent more than the total of the corresponding cards, and it would take me hours to go back through the stack and find the check and card that didn’t match.
After finally getting a balance of checks and cards, I then had to carry all the cards to a machine on another floor. The machine, which was the first computer I ever saw (and not much of one, I suppose, compared to those of today) would add the total of the cards again, serving as a backup for the total Harvey and I had got earlier on the adding machine.
Why we didn’t put the cards in the computer in the first place is something I never found out. I asked Mr. Killingsworth, a sour little man, about it one day, and he explained, “I don’t know.”
Anyway, now we come to do not fold, staple, or mutilate your loan-payment card. If a card had a staple in it, the card with the staple would upset the computer, which would begin eating all the cards. If the card was folded or otherwise mutilated, it would also upset the computer, which would begin eating all the cards. What I would be left with was a lot of loan-payment cards torn to shreds, which meant I had to go back upstairs and punch out new cards, which was a helluva lot of trouble.
I had a couple of other jobs before this one. I sacked groceries for one dollar an hour. I worked with one of those companies that put up shell homes—“a dollar and a deed is all you need.” I scraped paint off windows and helped two guys named Marcus and Willie dig up stumps in the yards. I got five dollars a day for that.
None of those jobs was very much fun, but I never came to hate them the way I came to hate my job at the First National Bank, dealing with dingbats and chewed-up loan-payment cards.
On top of everything I’ve mentioned so far, there was the matter of the organization chart, which was on the wall in the loan-payment department for everybody to see.
Mr. Killingsworth was on top of the chart. Next came his assistants, and so on. On the very bottom of the chart was my name alongside Harvey’s. It’s one thing to know you are scum and dirt and whale dung, but it is quite another to have to look at it and have others see it on a big chart—every
