What’s Your Job – Bank Teller
My first adult job was working in a bank as a teller. I worked in the afternoons after high school and got school credit. I worked for Oregon Bank. It no longer exists, it was bought out during the crazy time in the late 80′s when all the small banks were going under. My first job was working the drive-up window. I felt very important being at that window where people came to me for their transactions. I had my own cash drawer and teller machine. If they were making a deposit, I had to make sure all the money and checks added up correctly. If they were making a withdrawal, I had to count the money in front of the window so they could see me. And yes, I got to push out the drawer to the car window. I had little doggie biscuits for the dogs and suckers for the kids. Another part of my job was to balance check books for people. Yes, people actually still did their statements on paper back then. My favorite story for a messed up check book came from a wealthy lady. She was horribly upset because her account was overdrawn. She just couldn’t understand it. Her husband had left her some checks to use when he went on a business trip and she still had 3 left. How could her account be overdrawn??? When I became more comfortable handling money, I was moved out to the front line. This is at the teller window where you bring your transactions inside the bank. You still handle easy transactions, but you also handled more difficult ones as well. Business owners would come in with piles of money that had to be counted or bags of change. There were machines that did this for you, but more paperwork was involved. You might have someone who wanted a cashiers check or travellers checks. For each transaction, you had slips of paper representing debits and credits which had to be separated into different trays. Each person had a second job in the bank. You might be responsible for the safety deposit boxes. You had to check people in, open their box for them, then lock it back up. You might be responsible for the loan transactions or be the vault teller responsible for making sure everybody had enough change in their drawers and counting all the bank’s money. Some businesses put their deposits into a locked bag and put it in an overnight drop box. If you were on an opening shift, you might have to open the drop box and go through all the bags, making the appropriate deposits. Today, you might have to go through the night deposits from the ATM machines. Other departments of the bank include new accounts, loans and investments. As a front line teller you were supposed to keep up on all the new programs and special deals being offered by the other departments so that you could try and sell them to your customers. At the end of the day, you had to balance out. This means all the transactions for the day must balance. All those slips of paper in the debit and credit bins had to equal a report you ran on your teller machine. If not, you had to go through all the papers in your debit and credit trays to try and figure out what mistake you made. Did I ever get robbed? No, but the branch I worked at did on a day I was off. I worked as a teller for several years before moving to other departments in the bank. There is no special training or education for a beginning teller. You work the typical Monday through Friday – 8 or 9 to 5 or 6. Some banks are open on Saturday mornings. If you like working with money and people, this might be the job for you. 
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