Too much work at the branch meant endless overtime, followed by staff dinners. At times I felt so angry a blood vessel in my head might burst; then numbness would set in, and I felt nothing. My own duties were more than enough to keep me busy. However hard I worked, overtime was inevitable. Leaving at seven in the evening was a special occasion, the sort that came around once every three weeks.
What did we do during overtime? Call customers with maturing deposits and installment savings accounts to persuade them to redeposit. Illegally send unwanted texts to customers on the deputy branch manager's orders. Contact customers whose loans were due for renewal. Assemble documents to send out. Put together cheap promotional gifts. Turn the customer forms gathered at client dinners into sales. The work never stopped. That was fortunate, at least. Without work to do, we'd have to go out and personally beg people for their IDs.
This happened when we were recruiting Taecheon University's incoming freshmen. We assembled sets of account and debit-card application forms, handed them out at the welcome event for new students, and collected them afterward. The bait was a coupon for an iced Americano at the campus café if they opened an account. The café was delighted that Goldlight Bank would pay in advance for iced Americanos for 122 freshmen.
Taecheon University specialized in preparing students for the civil service exams. It stood partway up a mountain, and every student lived in a dormitory. Its best-known departments were public administration, law, economics, and social welfare, and many graduates passed the civil service exams.
Customers at our branch had told me several times that Mount Taecheon was home to the Dragon Gate, where dragons ascended, bringing good fortune in official careers and accounting for all those successful candidates. Supposedly the mountain looked like a great dragon lying down, a wish-granting pearl in its mouth, waiting for its moment to ascend to heaven. I let it go in one ear, nodded and said I thought so too, then let it out the other.
According to students who visited the branch, it had nothing to do with geomancy. The slope was so steep that food-delivery motorcycles only came halfway up, and the surrounding mountains made the internet unreliable. There was nothing to do but study. Trapped there and forced to study, you practically had to pass the civil service exam eventually.
We had to issue transaction-account passbooks and debit cards from the forms we'd brought back. Deputy Branch Manager Kim Jong-do assigned thirty each to Assistant Manager Bae Seo-yeon, me, Officer Bu Ha-yun, and Officer Kim Jin-ju. Bae alone got thirty-two.
At the morning meeting, the branch manager seemed to be hinting that all 122 sales should go under Manager Song Byeong-jun's name. He went on about how quickly Song had been promoted and how hard he was working this year. When I asked whether I should give Song all the paperwork, he changed his tune and told us to claim credit for our own work. Instead, he ordered us to finish every form we'd been assigned that day.
Apparently there was a staff dinner at seven. That was news to me. The deputy branch manager barked at us to have everything issued and ready by six thirty. In effect, that meant doing it during business hours, from nine to four. After four, checking all the money, documents, taxes, foreign currency, and controlled stationery that had entered or left the branch took about two hours.
Ding-dong. I called the next ticket, greeted the customer in front of me, then cut out a signature and pasted it into the university student's passbook I'd just printed. While a student's debit card was baking in the card printer, a customer would ask for a replacement card. I'd pull the university card out before it had even cooled, shove it into a passbook sleeve, and feed the customer's card into the machine. I worked with a customer's withdrawal slip and passbook in my right hand and a university student's passbook in my left. It was utter chaos.
At noon, the first lunch shift, the deputy branch manager shouted to ask how many each of us had finished. Even the branch manager asked over messenger. Issuing passbooks and debit cards between calling tickets doubled customers' waiting times. I'd barely managed fourteen before lunch.
Bae had done the fewest, nine, and the deputy branch manager snapped at her for being so slow. Of course she was. She had customers to serve as well. A loan consultation took much longer. You couldn't tell a customer who'd made time to come in, ‘One moment! I'll focus on what you're saying after I print this other customer's passbook.’
I was worried we'd give customers incorrect information in all this chaos. That would mean complaints. I sent Bu and Kim a message.
[Focus on the customers in front of you. Even if we're late to dinner, the most important thing is not to make mistakes. Doing the job properly matters more than getting yelled at. Who's going to be late with me?]
I printed passbooks and churned out cards without even time for the bathroom. To make collection easy, I put each finished passbook, card, and ID into a single passbook sleeve. I bundled those sets in groups of ten with rubber bands and checked that none was missing its promotional coupon.
A short shriek made me turn. It was Kim Jin-ju. Apparently a page had flipped up as she fed a passbook into the printer, causing the first page's contents to print on the second. You couldn't hand it over saying, ‘The information meant for page one is on page two. But you can still read it, can't you?’ That passbook was ruined. We could print another, but the bank didn't tolerate employee mistakes. Simply reprinting it would leave the controlled-stationery count one passbook short. There was a workaround to make the count balance, but it was a nuisance.
I expected Hong Hui-gyeong to rush over and tear into Kim the way she did Bu. Instead, she acted as if Kim didn't exist. She merely called out loudly enough for every officer to hear:
“Let's not make mistakes! Well, you're the one who'll suffer if you do, aren't you?”
Four o'clock passed and the shutters came down. I'd never been so glad to hear that sound. I was printing my twenty-seventh passbook. Judging by the stack on Bae's desk, she hadn't even reached twenty. Understandably: she'd had three customers seeking personal-loan consultations. At another branch, managers might have taken those customers at their own desks when we were this busy. Given the character of Hong Hui-gyeong, Song Byeong-jun, and Hwang Jae-ik, that would never happen here.
Once I'd issued all thirty students' passbooks and cards, I quickly checked the thirty sets of documents and the names on the passbooks and cards. One mistake, and it was over. Then I balanced my cash and closed out my teller account. Bae had finally left her chair for her first bathroom visit of the day. When she returned, I asked how many she'd done.
“I'm printing number eighteen.”
Her hands were moving so fast they almost blurred, but the passbook printer couldn't keep up. At a bank, whether it was a cash-balance issue or something else, one person's unfinished work could keep practically the entire branch from leaving. Then one of two things happened. Either everyone helped that person finish quickly, or everyone waited around cursing them.
Hwapyeong was the former. Taecheon was the latter. I didn't need to see the future to know that, in an hour, everyone would be hurling abuse at Bae. We can't close the bank because of you.
“Give me eight, then.”
“......Really? Are you sure?”
“Quick, before I take it back.”
Bae only smiled at customers; with her colleagues, her face was almost always blank. Now she showed the faintest trace of gratitude as she counted out eight sets of forms, eight blank passbooks, and eight debit cards and handed them to me. As soon as I took them, I checked the controlled-stationery count myself.
“You must be busy too.”
“Don't worry. I'll put the sales under your name.”
“No, Officer Eun. Use yours. I don't mind.”
“No. I feel bad. I think we're in this mess because I opened my mouth this morning. Besides, I was just lucky none of the loan consultations came to me.”
When you called a ticket, how could you know which customer would come to whom, or what they needed? I might have had ten consultations and not issued a single passbook. At Hwapyeong, helping out at times like this was normal. At Taecheon, everyone was desperate to tear everyone else apart. Amid the rush of my own closing duties, I looked through the forms Bae had given me. It's fine. I can do this. Just do it. As she returned to her desk, she said:
“It's just that I feel bad.”
I filled my tumbler with water in the kitchenette, sat down, entered Bae Seo-yeon's employee number, and worked like a machine stamping out passbooks and cards. As I entered personal details and printed passbooks, I wondered if eight had been too ambitious. Maybe I should have taken four. I beat back that moment of weakness and moved my hands faster. If we didn't finish before dinner, the branch manager would spend the next week making a scene and targeting the employee responsible. Almost certainly Bae.
It was nearly six when I pulled my thirty-eighth card out of the printer. With eight sets off her hands, Bae had finished before me and was finally checking the ATM and balancing the cash for the whole branch.
Finishing everything by six thirty was impossible. Kim Jin-ju, in particular, had entered a customer's name incorrectly and printed the passbook, then spent more than twice as long correcting and reprinting it.
It was almost seven before we'd somehow cobbled together 122 passbooks and 122 debit cards. We barely reconciled the controlled-stationery counts before leaving. I wasn't even sure we'd got them right. Branch Manager Ma, who'd been checking the sales figures in the system all along, apparently saw the numbers he wanted. He smiled in satisfaction.
“Of course our Taecheon staff could do it. A hundred or so in a day is nothing.”
Bae, the other officers, and I were gasping under the workload as if we'd completed an enormous marathon. What bullshit. You try making them. We'd been so busy rushing those accounts through that I could barely remember how I'd handled the day's customer consultations. At least my cash had balanced. The sheer workload kept leaving a sickly sweet taste in my mouth. Was it really all right to work this frantically, cutting corners everywhere?