Stephen said to me, sneeringly, “How many accounts do you have today?”

Today, I would finally give him an answer he would like. For this day, I had a savior’s touch. I ended up opening 5 accounts, something unheard of. I was lucky if I could open one account a day at our little bank branch, but the expectations for our branch campaign was such that each banker had to open at least 2-3 accounts a day.

The most desperate Branch Manager at Sax, Stephen, was in super-joy hearing about my five accounts. He had been saying that life sucked. He hated his job. He hated his alcoholic girlfriend. He was balding. I felt sorry for him. He was in the middle of pressure. He got it from Damon, the district manager, who got it from David, the borough manager, who got it Damian, the city manager, who got it from Dirk, the regional manager. All D’s, all geo-divisions, and all pressure. Dirk was in corporate; he would get spreadsheets telling him that the Bank’s numbers needed rising. He would push Damian to push his district managers to push his branch managers to push their bankers to sell as much bank portfolio as possible, but the most important thing was to sell more checking accounts than our system was able to open, which was a lot, since we controlled the numbers and we would never run out of numbers, and if a sequence of numbers on an account was ever fully used up, randomly, then the system, we were told, would create longer account numbers, from 5 digit to 12 digit account numbers. We were told, and I paraphrased really, that we needed saturation of not just our market, but all of the US. It was too bad, some district managers reasoned, that Sax was not in all 50 states, but 37 and a half states was not that bad either (Dirk would brag that we were in half of Minnesota; that was the kind of guy Dirk was.)

I still thought of Stephen as being in the middle. Damon made him nervous each time he called him and extremely nervous when he would do his surprise visits at our branch. Then Stephen had to hear it from us; I mean, he would have to be there nagging all of us and what could we do if we had no accounts. Yet, my confidant colleague who became my best friend, Linda, thought that pressure was something he got and gave away to us.

Linda was a bit disconcerted about the over-saturation of checking accounts – especially because it was hard to open up more than one. See, not everyone who needed an account came in. It was summer and people were on vacation. And, contrary to our Customer Service Associate (or CSA[1]), Jules, him and his supreme Saxy beliefs, not everyone needed three checking accounts – Jules had drunk the Sax Kool-Aid. He loved where he worked and he enjoyed selling customers 4 to 5 unneeded accounts. It made Linda call him a '”deuce-bag,” something refreshing to hear in our corporate world.

Her down-to-earth quirkiness and many other characteristics made me fall in love with Linda, among them, the way she’d make me laugh, her sexy blond hair and curvaceous body, her pleasant warmth, and her love of punk rock, which was already classic by the end of the zero digit decade. I would give her chocolate candy; she would buy me coffee at the store next door. We’d exchange books, which was unheard of in our branch circles, for some reason. We became two peas in a pod or peas and carrots, though I’d be a carrot and she, plenty of peas. We’d joke around we’d have children together even though she was unfortunately already engaged to someone else, and we’d also make fun of our lecherous fellow business banker, Jim, who was really cheating on his wife and quite openly so, with customers too! It kept us sane in our little crazed bank branch.

Wrong or not, Damon made sure that Stephen would make sure to make us sure that every customer out there needed at least three accounts. Since I could not swallow that, I only sold to customers what they needed. If they really needed three, then three it was, if only one, then one. For some, a savings account was better, but that was hell for Stephen. He’d scream once in a while, “We don’t make any money on Savings Accounts. Get me some real Accounts!!”

The gentleman I once opened an account for was from Mexico. His name was Helchor. During account opening time, I asked him if he was a US resident.

He said, “I have no green card and it’s harder to get one if you come from Mexico. It’s easier for South Americans to get green cards, but it’s harder for them to get Visas. It’s easier for us Mexicanos to get Visas, but to limit the number of Mexicanos from living here, the US Immigration Department doesn’t issue visas as many green cards.”

We still opened the account for him and we applied for a credit card, what he really wanted. It made Stephen happy, that I was able to sell this guy a checking account, when in fact, he just wanted a credit card. We applied for the credit card, but who knew if he would get that card. Our credit department was not issuing credit cards easily.

However, Stephen would argue “the credit department would consider you more for a credit card if you have a checking account relationship,” which was bogus and he knew it, but it was possibly true. I never did find out. Either way, I remember I had at least 7 clients who applied for credit cards, who also opened checking accounts, and they were turned down for credit. One guy was so annoyed that he closed the checking account. One other customer told me, “Jesus, you can’t give me credit because of a bill I didn’t pay back when I was eighteen?!” He was forty now. Apparently, he needed medical services when he was 18 for a broken arm. He had missed being in his insurance plan by a couple of months; he had just turned 18 and his mother’s coverage ended at that date, but his accident happened two days before he was 18 and the treatment, which included a surgery because he needed a bullet implant in his arm bone, went past the date he turned 18, so the insurance company only paid until that date, the other treatment, which he thought was covered, was not covered, but he never got a bill, all he got was a statement saying, ‘this is not a bill.’ The statement explained all the services rendered to him at the hospital and that the insurance company had paid. Little did he know that the treatment two days past his eighteenth birthday was never paid. He never got notices. He finally received a notice from a credit collection agency, ten years later, when he was 28 that he had to pay $300 for arm surgery treatment. He questioned it and when he got the run-around by the credit collection agency, he decided to pay it. Little did he know that this little blip in his credit history would cause Sax to deny his credit application, 12 years later.

“You people are crazy,” he complained. But he did not close his account. Unlike the other customer, who politely told me, “Well, if I am unable to receive credit from this bank, I am afraid I have to close the checking account. I pray you understand. Forgive me, Mr.…how do you say it, your last name?”

“You can call me Tony.”

“Tony, as I was saying, I really needed the credit card, not the checking account. However, I was rather convinced by you I should open the account when you explained the features and benefits; however, these features are useless if I do not have the credit card. Please close my account.” His sincerity destroyed any notions of me charging him the fee for closing the account. Yes, the bank would charge you $30 for closing an account that you had opened in less than 50 days—even if Stephen would yell at me for refunding the fee, this customer deserved to not be charged, or so was my judgmental analysis, besides I thought, Linda would do the same thing; she became a moral compass to me.

Another confidant banker of mine, Franklin, would tell me that it cost the branch $300 to close an account, whereas if we open an account, the branch profits by $150. Yet, Stephen, Damon and the entire system didn’t care how many accounts we closed, just how many we opened. I was in the lobby one time waiting for customers to come into our little branch. No one was coming so to make conversation, I asked Stephen, “Is it true that Seema is coming back?”

“Yes,” he said giving me a look that said, why are you talking to me when you should be talking to customers coming in? But there was no-one coming..., so I continued:

“When?”

“As soon as I fire one of you guys. She’s the banker who gets me accounts in five minutes, not like you guys who tell me ‘later’ or ‘tomorrow’.”

“Yes, she would easily get 20 accounts one week and the next, I’d have to close them because these accounts were secondary accounts and these customers did not want them to begin with.”

“That doesn’t matter. We’re in the business of opening accounts. I don’t care if we close them.”

“But doesn’t it cost money to close accounts?”

“You’re starting to sound like Luke.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t get tied up in philosophy. This business is about showing positive numbers; who cares about the negative ones!”

[1] Sax had plenty of acronyms for its job positions.