Working

by Studs Terkel

  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.)

  Most bank tellers are women because of the pay scale. It’s assumed that women are paid a little bit lower than men. (Laughs.) There are only two men that work in the area, aside from my supervisor. The head teller, who’s been there for years and years and years, and a young fella in charge of all the silver. For most men it’s a job that doesn’t offer that much kind of advancement. You’d have to be the type that would really just enjoy sittin’ back and doing the same thing over and over again. A transaction is a transaction is a transaction.

  Some days, when you’re aggravated about something, you carry it after you leave the job. Certain people are bad days. (Laughs.) The type of person who will walk in and says, “My car’s double-parked outside. Would you hurry up, lady? I haven’t got time to waste around here.” And you go—“What???” You want to say, “Hey, why did you double-park your car? So now you’re gonna blame me if you get a ticket, ’cause you were dumb enough to leave it there?” But you can’t. That’s the one hassle. You can’t say anything back. The customer’s always right.

  Certain people who are having a bad day themselves feel they must take it out on you: “What are you doing there?” “Why are you checking that?” “Why did you have to do that?” You calmly try and explain to them, “That’s what’s required.” You can’t please ’em. They make sure you’re in as nasty a mood as they are. (Laughs.)

  We have quite a bit of talk during coffee breaks. There’s speculation: “Do you think this is what happened?” There was a girl who was let go this week. Nobody was told as to the why or wherefore. Nobody really still knows. They keep coming through the bank saying, “We don’t want rumors started about such-and-such.” But they don’t explain it. She doesn’t exist any more totally. She’s no longer here.

  The last place I worked for, I was let go. I told the people I worked with, “If anybody asks, tell them I got fired and give them my phone number.” One of my friends stopped by and asked where I was at. They said, “She’s no longer with us.” That’s all. I vanished.

  When it happened, it was such an abrupt thing. I hadn’t really expected it. I was supposed to be an example so that these things wouldn’t occur any more. One of the factors was a man I wasn’t getting along with. He worked out at the desk. He was—how can I put it?—he was a very handsy person. He was that way towards everybody. I didn’t like it. He’d always pick out a time when you were balancing or you were trying to figure something out. You didn’t want to be interrupted. At other times, you wouldn’t mind, you’d laugh it off.

  The reason I was given for being fired was that I was absent too much and had been tardy too often. But I think there was really another reason. The girl who was supervisor was leaving and I was next in seniority. I just don’t think they were going to let me go further.

  With her the job was everything, it was her whole life. She would stay there till seven in the evening if something went wrong, and come in on Saturdays if they asked her to. When I was done—I’m sorry, I was done for the day.

  And I was very open about being different. It started when one of the girls had brought in a little sticker-thing for Valentine’s Day. I thought they were cute. So I had just taken a couple of hearts out of one and put it on my name sign on the window, ‘cause I liked it. There was never anything really said except “How come that’s there?” And I said, “ ’Cause I like it.” A lot of customers’d come in and say, “Wow! She had hearts on her window, she must be a nice girl.” It gave them an opportunity to have something to say instead of just feeling they didn’t know you and didn’t quite know what to say. I think the bank didn’t care for that too much. They want everybody to be pretty much the same, kind of conservative, fitting into the norm. I think that was the real reason I was let go.

  I think a lot of places don’t want people to be people. I think they want you to almost be the machines they’re working with. They just want to dehumanize you. Just like when you walk in in the morning, you put the switch on and here you are: “I am a robot. This is what I do. Good morning. How are you? May I help you?” I hate having to deal with people like that.

  In some way, I feel my job’s important. Especially when you work with people who are trying to save money. It’s gratifying for them when they give you the stuff and you mark in their book and there it is—wow! I’ve accomplished this. And you say, “I’m glad to see you again. You’re really doing well.” Most of these people here work in restaurants downtown and are secretaries. Lower middle class and a lot of blacks come in this bank. They’re a lot more friendly than some of your other people, who are so busy trying to impress one another.

  They don’t even recognize you. It’s like I’m almost being treated as a machine. They don’t have time to bother. After all, you’re just a peon. I had a black man come up to my window and say, “It’s really nice to see somebody working in a place like this who’s even halfway relevant.” And I thought—wow! (Laughs.) I had my hair up like in little ponytails on the side and just had a pullover sweater and a skirt on and wasn’t really dressed up. I was very taken aback by it. It’s the first compliment I had in a long time. It’s nice to be recognized. Most places, it’s your full name on the window. Some places just have Miss or Mrs. So-and-so. I prefer giving my whole name so people can call me Nancy. (Laughs.) They feel a little more comfortable. Certain officers you refer to by their first names. Other people you don’t. Some people you would feel kind of weird saying, “Hey, Charlie, would you come over here and do this for me?” Other people you’d feel strange calling them by their proper name. All men who sit at the desk in the office you refer to as Mister. Okay, he’s a vice president, he must be called Mr. So-and-so. Whereas you’re just a teller. Therefore he can call you by your first name. Smaller banks tend to be more friendly and open.

  When I tell people at a party I work for a bank, most of them get interested. They say, “What do you do?” I say, “I’m a teller.” They say, “Oh, hmm, okay,” and walk away. I remember getting into a discussion with one person about the war. We were disagreeing. He was for it. I wasn’t getting angry because I thought he has his right to his point of view. But the man couldn’t recognize that I had the right to mine. The thing finally was thrown at me: “What do you mean saying that? After all, who are you? I own my own business, you just work in a crummy bank.” It doesn’t compute. Like, unless you’re capable of making it in the business world, you don’t have a right to an opinion. (Laughs.)

  My job doesn’t have prestige. It’s a service job. Whether you’re a waitress, salesperson, anything like that—working directly for the public—it’s not quite looked on as being prestigious. You are there to serve them. They are not there to serve you. Like a housemaid or a servant.

  One of the girls said, “People who go through four years of college should have it recognized that they have achieved something.” A man said, “Don’t you think someone who becomes an auto mechanic and is good at it should also be recognized? He’s a specialist, too, like the man who goes to be a doctor.” Yet he’s not thought of that way. What difference? It’s a shame that people aren’t looked at as each job being special unto itself. I can’t work on a car, yet I see people who can do it beautifully. Like they have such a feel for it. Some people can write books, other people can do marvelous things in other ways . . .

  FRED ROMAN

  I usually say I’m an accountant.
Most people think it’s somebody who sits there with a green eyeshade and his sleeves rolled up with a garter, poring over books, adding things—with glasses. (Laughs.) I suppose a certified public accountant has status. It doesn’t mean much to me. Do I like the job or don’t I? That’s important.

  He is twenty-five and works for one of the largest public accounting firms in the world. It employs twelve hundred people. He has been with the company three years. During his first year, after graduating from college, he worked for a food chain, doing inventory.

  The company I work for doesn’t make a product. We provide a service. Our service is auditing. We are usually hired by stockholders or the board of directors. We will certify whether a company’s financial statement is correct. They’ll say, “This is what we did last year. We made X amount of dollars.” We will come in to examine the books and say, “Yes, they did.”

  We’re looking for things that didn’t go out the door the wrong way. Our clients could say, “We have a million dollars in accounts receivable.” We make sure that they do, in fact, have a million dollars and not a thousand. We ask the people who owe the money, “Do you, in fact, owe our client two thousand dollars as of this date?” We do it on a spot check basis. Some companies have five thousand individual accounts receivable. We’ll maybe test a hundred.

  We’re also looking for things such as floating of cash. If a company writes a check one day and deposits money the next day, it tells you something of its solvency. We look for transfers between accounts to make sure they’re not floating these things—a hundred thousand dollars they keep working back and forth between two banks. (Laughs.)

  We work with figures, but we have to keep in mind what’s behind those figures. What bugs me about people in my work is that they get too wrapped up in numbers. To them a financial statement is the end. To me, it’s a tool used by management or stockholders.