SPRINGING AHEAD... A busy time (Part 127q)

SPRINGING AHEAD... A busy time (Part 127q)

For reasons that I certainly wasn’t going to pursue, Elle was particularly ”amorous“  when she came back from tucking the kids into bed. She’d peed through her ”dribble panties“  before coming downstairs and proceeded to climb up on me. I enjoyed the ”play time“ but I wanted to take advantage of her current state of mind and wasted no time in getting down to some serious lovemaking. We moved over to the couch and, although I didn’t last all that long, enjoyed myself. It had been a while.

I wanted to be at work early for the first day of the ”busy time“. Elle persuaded her mother to get to the house early so we left at basically the same time. Walking into the lobby I felt confident that the bank was in good shape to handle the expected crowds. Even though Donna was relatively new, I felt her maturity and her ability to handle difficult customers would hold her in good stead. Bret and I’d made sure we had adequate supplies and I’d talked with Robby, the equipment service man, about being available for ”extra“ help if the bookkeeping machine (computer) broke down.

When 9am arrived I couldn’t believe my eyes. The lobby was absolutely filled with people in just ten minutes. By 9:30am I’d signed at least a half dozen checks (Tellers were authorized to sign checks for withdrawals of up to $1,000. At that amount or above an officer had to countersign.) for what seemed to be more money than usual. Right from the time I’d started at the bank two years prior I tracked daily deposit flows. On the first day of each busy period in that two years we’d experienced net deposit outflows with the trend reversing with each following day. However, I couldn’t remember having to sign so many checks especially that early in the day. Cara came to my desk with a check for a sizeable sum. Her teller station was right in my sight line and I recognized her customer as being one of her friends so asked Cara to gently inquire what the check was to be used for. A few minutes later Cara returned with the words that would change the way we did business as we moved forward. The money was going to the new bank that had opened up to the West of us. But that wan’t the bad news. It was that they were giving away gifts for each new account that was opened for $1,000 or more.

I made a quick check of each teller station and found they were all experiencing the same thing. I let Hobie know and he, in turn, called Bert, the president. I won’t call it panic but within minutes the three of us were meeting to try and find out how they had advertised the gift campaign without using the local weekly paper. It took a while but found that they’d used the daily papers that were geared more for residents much closer to the city. When I heard that I remember having asked our ad agency how much it cost to put ads in them and was told we’d blow our whole yearly budget in a week. I was also aware that we were operating on a very thin margin what with paying 5% for deposits and only making 6% on the mortgage loans we made. It just didn’t make sense but it was happening.

When the Trustees got there for the weekly mortgage committee meeting the word was out. I wouldn’t call it a ”run“ on the bank but it wasn’t far from it. The tally at the end of the day was that more than $200,000 in checks had been written. By 4pm a special meeting of the Trustees was convened. They were upset that we hadn’t been prepared for the situation. I’d contacted the three other like banks and they found themselves in the same situation. I’d been vaguely aware that some banks located in the heart of the city had used gifts to lure depositors in at the end of the previous year but we never considered them to be competitors being located some 85 miles to the West of us. By the time the meeting was over (7pm) a couple of new committees had been formed with one being directed to go find some property to the West to establish a branch. I was asked to stay at the meeting to answer specific questions about  the deposit traffic for the day and what we could do to combat the other bank. I don’t remember who brought it up but the subject of having a service bureau process our deposits and withdrawals came up with the talk about having a branch office. For me that was worth the wait to go home because I was told to be prepared to make my recommendation on Friday. I could have done it in about five minutes as my report was in my desk downstairs.

As you can probably surmise, the next two days were basically the same with far more money going out than coming in.There was one incident when Donna overheard Jacqui, the teller who’d been hired just prior to her, give out some misinformation. She inserted herself into the situation which upset Jacqui. If it hadn’t been for it being late on a Friday, I’m almost sure Jacqui would’ve quit. I told her to go home and to think about it and elicited a promise she’d be back to talk with me Monday morning. I spoke to Donna before she left and she wasn’t too pleased with me for having done it. I remember it being one of the few times she didn’t try to flirt with me when at my desk.


Earlier, I'd made my report to the Trustees and recommended we use the commercial bank I'd visited to do our servicing. It started another vigorous discussion and no decision was made but yet another committee was created to do an "independent" study. It made me feel like nothing I'd presented mattered. Actually, it just added to my negative feeling about the men who were responsible for overseeing the health of the bank. As I left the meeting I got to wondering just how much knowledge a shoe store owner, a hardware store owner, a lumberyard owner, a farmer, a real estate agent, two attorneys, a new truck dealer and two other retired retail store owners actually knew about running a bank. The only thing I saw was a group of men who created more and more committees so that they could collect attendance fees. To finish off an absolutely terrible beginning to the ”busy period”, J J (the mortgage officer from upstairs) paid me a visit before he left for the night. He’d been informed two weeks prior that the the lady who handled the mortgage loan payoffs for the bank wanted to retire and she wanted to know where her paperwork was. I wanted to hit him upside his head. There was no way for me to gather all the forms up for her to take with her that night because Trish kept them in her files and she was long gone. I felt badly for her but there was just no way. Needless to say I was not in a good mood when I left.

To be continued...