Saturday, March 31, 2012

Thnk, David, Think!

I submitted this to a blogging contest at my work. The topic: what was it like went you started working at the bank?

Poppy seed muffin.

Prayer circle.

California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington.

A U-Haul filled with IBM boxes for servers and workstations.

Riverbank as a construction site.

New coworkers who’d all just been out on the road for weeks at a time over the pervious several months doing bank conversions.

Argo, AIX, CA7, CICS, CM/2, DCMF, JCL, Micro Channel, MVS, OS/2, RACF, Tivoli, Token Ring, SNA, and a whole bunch of other names and acronyms—I didn’t have a clue what most of them stood for.

These were some of the things that greeted me as I started working at US BANK in August, 1998, as the newest member of the Lobby Support group. I was very jealous that my new colleagues had just been all over the western United States converting bank branches from the old, original U.S. Bank. They seemed to have genuinely enjoyed their experiences, and seemed to be a pretty tight knit group.

For me, this was a second career, after teaching and going back to school to get a Masters degree. Fancy title: Master of Science of Network Engineering. But really, I didn’t know a whole lot about that either. I was thinking maybe I’d be a technical writer or something like that. I don’t think that I even had a complete resume posted online. But the job market was so good at that time, I got an interview and hired anyway. Didn’t know what those terms in the job description meant? No problem. I’d learn.

Because I had a job offer letter, I qualified for a mortgage. My spouse and I looked to move to the metro area from Little Falls. Bidding wars made home buying difficult. We found a house we liked, and I think the owner, a woman, recently widowed and children grown, sold to us both because of our genuine, sweet-talking realtor, and because she liked that we were a young family (our children were two and six at the time.)

Moving boxes? No problem. Because of the bank conversions, there was an abundance of boxes with blue “IBM” logos. We packed up everything in those boxes and loaded them up in a U-Haul in Little Falls. If we’d been stopped or pulled over, I was sure that we’d have been suspected for an IBM computer heist.

On arrival in at our new house in Saint Paul, several of my co-workers showed up and helped us unload. Amazing.

Work for me meant support and troubleshooting for the new branches. Tons of tickets. On the phone with tellers, bankers, branch managers. Trying to figure which of the meaningless acronyms were broken. I remember being in my mentor’s cube, seated at her PC, staring blankly at 3270 session running on OS/2, trying to figure out a problem, and my mentor, standing behind me, looking over my shoulder, urging:

“Think, David, think!”

Half of Riverbank was empty, still under construction as I entered for the first time at the temporary entrance, a plywood board ramp instead of stairs, the security guards sitting at a card table.

While I am pretty sure I have my mom’s prayer circle to thank (at least in part) for my getting a job, the poppy seed muffins that we ate in celebration—delayed my start. Word of advice: don’t have a poppy seed muffin before your health screening for a new job.

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