Not sure if this belongs here or in another forum but there is a bank right next to my girlfriend’s house. I wanna say it has one other branch in a nearby town.
A guy who I can only assume is the manager is ALWAYS there. They run the standard 8 to 5 business hours but he stays late. Sometimes every night of the week. Sometimes he goes home for supper and then to change into casual clothes but he typically stays until 9 pm.
I was there today and he was there tonight (Sunday) at around 6 PM when I left her place.
What’s the deal? How could there be so much work do be done at a bank after business hours?
Of course there is the possibility that he’s doing something illegal in there or that he hates his wife and doesn’t wanna go home, but I don’t believe it.
Banks love their reports, so if he is the manager he would have any number of compliance reports to be done, actioned and returned to head office.
Since its a retail branch, there can be a lot of work in tracing under/overs. (i.e. the bank would do a cash-count after close each night, with the expectation that the transaction list and actual cash in the draw balances. If not that has to be traced and found. (How much time is spent on what dollar amount they are out would vary between banks)
Any number of client-related tasks, to fix up errors, make maintenance changes on clients accounts, (those sort of things aren’t all necessarily done while the client is in the branch). If he is involved in lending, there’s a whole raft of extra duties and requirements that need to be done. Even down to simply completing the application form loans before sending them off to be decisioned.
I work in the tech department of a bank and my manager is on-call 24/7 if the system has issues. If he wanted to stay until 9pm every night to add features to our website, the work is there. He doesn’t and it’s not necessary, but there’s plenty of work at a bank after the doors close for business.
Could be a staffing issue as well. There was a 3-4 month stretch early in my banking career where I worked 12-14 hours per day, 6 days a week. We simply had tons more admin stuff to do than people to do it.
I work for a bank in communications, and I frequently work 65 hour weeks. Officially we are fully staffed, that’s just what’s expected of the job. There is a ton of reporting to be done, not to mention marketing, training (compliance type training that must be completed on a regular basis, separate from specific job-task training), keeping all internal and external materials up-to-date, etc. If this is a small bank, they probably don’t have separate departments to handle all of that stuff.
I’ll just add that if you view a bank’s work as passing money to and from its vault and nothing more, the amount of after-hours work might seem mysterious. It’s a complicated business; there is endless work with reports and management and so forth, same as any other retail ‘store.’
True, but in these days of corporations running retail operations on the tightest possible budget, one manager who puts in 10-hour days is cheaper than 2-3 people doing the work in normal work hours. There’s also the ingrained trope that working those kind of hours shows you’re really, really dedicated etc. so forth and cough bullshit cough.
It seems like my bank has more employees on the job now, than back in the days when all accounts were written up by hand with a pen dipped in an inkwell. If computers are now doing all t hat, what are the people doing? In those days, when you phoned the bank, somebody answered the phone, too.
I’ve watched my teller when I deposit a check. It is about a ten-step operation, swiping the check, and entering digits, and whatnot.
For some reason, it takes more manpower to watch computers do the banking, than it took when people did it themselves.
Anyone who works in the mortgage field outside of sales is probably pulling 70 hour weeks right now (in most states). He might be an underwriter or the manager responsible for pre-foreclosure matters, though I’d expect them to work in national or regional HQ rather than a local branch.
I’d go with this. I took a class in banking a year or so ago, and the teacher was going on and on about what the manager does, and he wasn’t even an apologist for managers; those guys just have so many more responsibilities than we can imagine. And, that’s just the ones who *aren’t *cooking the books.