JOB SATISFACTION

Just now it struck me that today is the fifty-second anniversary of the day I joined a bank as a Probationary Officer. No, this is not an essay on "My First Day in the Bank" on the lines of the composition work one is assigned in schools.

The first thing that I noticed was that a bank considered itself the centre of the world. Or else why would a customer who wanted to PAY some money into his account be directed to the "RECEIPTS" counter? Why the label on the counter to which customers go for RECEIVING money after tendering a cheque should be "PAYMENTS" was a conundrum that I could never address, leave alone solve. Rather than from the perspective of the thousands of customers it serves, the bank considers everything from ITS side and that of the dozen or two people crouched behind the counters and minding others' money! It was indeed a world of contradictions!

The contradiction did not end there: the summary of the transactions of the day would be recorded in the General Ledger after they transit through what was called the Day Book, but I had felt that a more appropriate name for the Day Book would have been the Night Book. For, in those days of manual banking, the task of writing it could not be taken up in large branches until 8 pm after the other Subsidiary Books were completed.

If Day Book was a misnomer, its other moniker, Clean Cash Book, was no better. After the several revisions of numbers in the Subsidiary Books leading to consequential changes, amendments and corrections, its pages would be such a blotch of red and blue that no one in his right senses would call it the Clean Cash Book.

It did not take me long to discover that the contradiction in the nomenclature was all-pervasive. Though it was said that banking is based on trust, my limited experience told me that it was actually based on mistrust. Why else would there be the concept of 'maker and checker', collateral security and 'checks and balances'?

I soon realised that I was not cut out for the job I was doing. Not only was work in the branch of a bank repetitive and boring, it afforded hardly any scope for creativity. Bosses would frown at the slightest hint of deviation from the procedures and norms laid down. They swore by the sacrosanct Book of Instructions and circulars from the Head Office. (It was, of course, true that any departure from the former, handcrafted by the astute Irish and Scottish bankers, would make the transactions vulnerable.)

It was in 1975, while working in Calcutta, that feeling handcuffed, if not choked, by the rigours of the routine, one day I told my boss that I was fed up with the bank job. "It gives me no satisfaction," I told him. I wanted to look for another job. Mr Borker sat me down in front of him and gave me a short lecture. "Rajan, you will have either a job or satisfaction - but not both, whatever be the job you do," he concluded.

That, to me, was one of the most profound truths expounded.