Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the new branch to discover I really, really liked it. All the staff here were friendly and nice. They and the manager went out of their way to welcome me and help me fit in. Even the customers were good fun. A couple of nightclub owners banked with us and anytime the staff decided to have a night on the town (pretty much every weekend) we would be treated royally – no queuing to get in, best seats in the house.
Even though he was a fully paid up member of The Lodge, the new boss was a great bloke. I had been there for a couple of months when he called me into his office for a chat.
“Fancy a drink,” he asked.
“Is the Pope a Catholic,” I replied. He poured both of us a generous shot of Famous Grouse.
“So how is it going then?”
“Fine. I `m very happy here. Everybody has been great with me.”
“Yes. Nice people round here,” he agreed. “ You know I wasn’t looking forward to having you here when I first read your file. Who on earth have you upset? You are nothing like the person described in your file.”
He read out a couple of excerpts for me. I would have sued if he had given me a copy.
I told him that I had been applying for other jobs because I was so unhappy at how I had been treated, but he urged me to reconsider. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” he advised me. “ You have just been unlucky with some of the people you’ve worked under. Give it a chance and see what happens.”
So I gave it another chance and settled happily into life in Manchester.
For the first time in six years I no longer suffered from the dreaded PMT on Sunday evenings and thoroughly enjoyed my time at work. The boss was disgusted at the refusal of Head Office to fund my removal expenses and made sure that I was given every opportunity to earn extra money from travel expenses for relief work at other branches and bad debt visits. As I said, I found him to be a very decent bloke.
Having said that, it was while I was working here that I got arrested. There was a clever fraud being conducted that it took the police and us ages to catch on to. Customers would come in to complain that they had tried to withdraw cash from the hole-in –the-wall machine but the money didn’t come out. Later when we checked the computer records they showed that the money had been taken. We were baffled as to what was going on. Head Office insisted that the system was foolproof, the customers insisted that they didn’t get the money and we were piggy in the middle taking all the flak.