Hong Hui-gyeong was impressive in her own way, sending a customer like that to Bu Ha-yun. Did she have a nightmare-customer detector built into her eyes? I hurried over to Bu's desk.
“We can't disclose that information unless you're a first-priority heir. There is a Heirs' Financial Transaction Inquiry Service, however. You can apply online together with your parents, or your parents or your sister's spouse can visit a branch to inquire.”
“But I'm here in person! Tell me, and I'll tell my parents!”
Why do you need to know your sister's balance? Get lost.
“I'm afraid we can't, sir.”
After I repeated that several times with a blank expression, he glared back and forth between us. Eventually he must have realized we wouldn't do it. He grabbed his ID and family relations certificate and left, muttering fXck, fXck. I called a farewell after him that really meant, Hurry up and get lost.
“Thank you for visiting Goldlight Bank. Have a good day!”
“Have a good day!”
Bu quickly joined in. Only once he had disappeared from view and left the branch entirely did she look at me.
“......Thank you.”
“Be careful. If you'd told him the balance, you'd have been done for. And if you just give someone like that a document list, he'll come back making a scene. Why did you tell me what to bring without even checking that I'm a third-priority heir? You told me to bring the documents, so process it!”
“Yes.”
“Do you know the deceased person's resident registration number?”
“Yes.”
She'd apparently written it down. Good.
“Open the customer information screen and leave an internal memo about what happened today.”
“What should I write?”
“That someone claiming the customer had died visited today, at this exact time. Do you remember his name? Write it down. A man claiming to be the customer's older brother asked for the account balance, but Taecheon branch refused.”
“Okay. But why do we leave that?”
“To keep a record in case we need to check the CCTV or there's legal trouble later. Also, if he goes to another Goldlight branch and an employee enters that registration number, they'll see the memo and know to be careful.”
Bu wrote down my words, checked the caution box, and saved the memo. It appeared in bright red at the top of the customer's information.
“What would happen if I'd told him the balance?”
“The spouse or the deceased person's parents could sue you. Then Goldlight Bank would probably say there's nothing wrong with its system; you, the new hire, handled it incorrectly. Actually, we don't even know whether she's dead. Did he bring a basic certificate?”
“No.”
“Did he bring either a basic certificate recording her death or a death certificate?”
“No. He didn't.”
“He could have been asking for the balance of a living sister while claiming she was dead.”
Bu let out a deep sigh.
“That's true. Now that you mention it, he could have.”
“You'll get used to it with practice. Plenty of people ask for someone else's account balance. You've had one before, haven't you?”
A man claiming to be a father-in-law had once come to Bu with the name and birth date of a woman he said was about to marry into his family, demanding her account balance and transaction history. When she told him we couldn't verify she really was his future daughter-in-law and couldn't disclose the information, he'd shouted at her. As soon as I approached and asked what was happening, he got up and left.
“Hong's glaring at my back. I can practically feel it itching. I'd better get back to my desk.”
Speak of the devil. Hong shouted at my back.
“Officer Eun! Flirting with a woman instead of calling tickets? Can't you see the customers waiting?”
“I'm going now!”
If she'd called a ticket herself, there would already be one fewer customer waiting. I returned to my desk and pressed the button. A customer who'd waited at least thirty minutes sat down in irritation.
“Why doesn't anyone at this branch call numbers?”
I put on my most apologetic expression and soothed them.
“You've had a long wait, haven't you? I'm sorry to have kept you waiting. We're very busy today. I'll help you as quickly as I can.”
Kim Jin-ju almost never got difficult or demanding customers. Bu, who hadn't even been here three months, had to handle unfamiliar tasks for difficult people. When she couldn't answer their questions properly, they grew irritated. That flustered her further, leading to more mistakes, until they became angry. Then Hong swooped in as if she'd been waiting, explaining that our employee was new and must have answered incorrectly. She forced Bu's head down in apology and made her say she was sorry for knowing nothing. Even then, Hong didn't resolve the problem. She simply made Bu apologize and returned to her own desk. Panicking, her self-esteem shattered, Bu would struggle to sort things out while holding back tears and reading messages from Bae or me. Or one of us, unable to bear watching, would say we'd handle it and take the customer to our desk.
After countless repetitions, Bu was terrified whenever a customer approached. I'd even advised her to send anyone she couldn't handle alone to me. Whenever she followed that advice, Hong noticed with uncanny speed and called her a fucking idiot who couldn't even deal with her own customers. She yelled at me that if Bu became a banker unable to pull her weight, it would be my fault. Hong didn't see my help as a precaution against a new hire making a mess of an unfamiliar task or provoking a complaint, even though any mistake Bu made would have to be fixed by me, Bae, or a manager.
Hong accused me of favoring Bu over Kim and made remarks like, Officer Bu must be your type. As the saying goes, a pig sees only pigs and a Buddha sees only Buddhas. Perhaps her own mind was the reason she saw everything that way. Whenever I helped Bae or Bu, she was desperate to make it sexual. I looked at her in disbelief, then took aim at Senior Manager Gu, who'd just finished a phone call some distance away.
“If I had to pick someone at this branch who's my type, it would be Senior Manager Gu Ji-hye.”
“Oh my goodness. If I were ten years younger, you'd be in trouble, wouldn't you?”
Gu went on about how scary young people were these days. Apparently my flattery hadn't offended her; she announced that she was feeling generous and bought coffee for the whole branch. When the deputy branch manager asked if she was that pleased, she beamed and said, I've still got it, haven't I? My day isn't over yet. Hong briefly frowned when I dragged Gu into it, but didn't pick a fight about that.
Kim got easy, comfortable work, so I rarely needed to help her or received questions from her. Bu, meanwhile, had just been asked why a canceled overseas card payment wasn't refunded immediately, whether a dollar payment was charged at the rate on the purchase date or the bill-payment date, and whether the customer needed to receive their refund before closing the card account or could just close it. Answering required at least some understanding of credit-card processing. Or memorizing the relevant rules.
A customer made a purchase, the merchant passed the charge to the card company, and the card company billed the customer. How long a cancellation took depended on where in that process it occurred. Overseas purchases involved an additional foreign merchant in the chain, so they took twice as long. Bu had only been here two months. She couldn't instantly call up the entire credit-card payment process, nor could she know every credit-card regulation by heart. With this branch's insane schedule, she barely had time to sleep on weeknights. When was she supposed to memorize rules?
She'd asked Goldgrain, which apparently said it couldn't give an exact cancellation date. That was true. But you couldn't tell a customer, We don't know when it'll be canceled either. Ha ha ha! Her alternatives were asking Kim, who didn't know either; asking head teller Bae and feeling horribly guilty because Bae was already frantic; asking Hong, who'd say, Why are you alive if you don't even know that? Why do you work at a bank? and not answer; or asking Hwang, who'd say, Aren't you lonely at night? What's the women's residence like inside? Can I come have a look? Given those choices, she asked me, the slightly easier option.
[Do you know when an overseas credit-card payment cancellation goes through? Are card payments based on the payment date? Can a card be closed before the refund comes back? I thought it couldn't.]
[Canceled card payments come back through companies such as VISA, MASTERCARD, AMEX, UnionPay, or JCB, so they take two or three times longer than domestic cancellations, sometimes more. A week at the quickest; over two months at the slowest. The card rate is based on the payment date. Close the card after the refund comes in.]
As soon as my customer finished renewing their overdraft facility and left, another customer came to my desk before I could press the ticket button. They sat down, pointed at Hong, and said she'd told them to have their business handled here. Apparently she'd called their number and tossed them over to me. I was dumbfounded, but couldn't keep sending a customer from one place to another, so I seated them and handled it. It was a simple foreign-currency exchange. That required walking over to fetch the currency from behind Song's desk. Apparently she couldn't be bothered to get out of her chair and cross half the branch, so she'd made a customer who was already seated get up and come to me. Unbelievable. Customers weren't livestock to be herded back and forth.
Making customers move desks again was one of the surest ways to generate complaints. Who wanted to keep standing, sitting, standing, sitting, and changing seats? A restaurant shouldn't do that. Why would it be acceptable at a bank? Shortly afterward, Song also sent me a customer who'd sat at his empty desk because they urgently needed to transfer money. I calmed the customer, who kept insisting it had to be sent at once, and asked whom they were paying and where.
“There's nowhere you need to send money in a hurry. Wherever it's going, you can take your time.”
Song, whose soul lived inside his phone, caught my eye, smiled, and waved. They were exactly the same sort of sons of bitches. Playing billiards with customers. Sons of bitches.
It turned out to be voice phishing. The caller had sounded exactly like the customer's daughter, who'd supposedly been in a traffic accident and needed taxi fare and hospital fees. As her mother, the customer insisted she couldn't mistake her own daughter's voice. But it really had sounded identical: it was AI-generated. The scammers had manipulated the daughter's voice from a singing video she'd posted on social media and used it to call her mother. The customer's phone had already been hacked, so dialing her daughter's number only connected her to the scammers. Calling from my desk phone reached the real daughter, who said she was perfectly fine at work. I let them speak, reassured the customer, and sent her home. She reminded me of my own mother.
After she left, I looked at my PC. Song had sent a message. The first line complained that an old woman had sat in front of him begging about something urgent, bringing him bad luck first thing in the morning, and told me to make sure customers stayed away from his desk. I didn't even want to finish reading. I closed it halfway through.