It's In The Bank
|
Alone,Alone, all, all
alone
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge
|
Dominic Vautier
6/2022
My first career job was at U.S. Bank in Portland.
At a bank people had an assigned position. The saying was that when
a CEO at a
bank retired, then the janitor moved up. It appeared to work very much like that. Everything was clockwork.
There were around 13 programmers at U.S. Bank and
half of them were women, mostly of German decent which was unusual in
both ways. Germans make good programmers because they think logically or
something like that, and women made bad programmers because they think
illogically on something like that.
So if we
went to war with
Germany the banks would probably all
fail or something like that.
I liked the women and ate lunch with them They were good company.
The
guys thought I was weird because at the bank guys ate lunch with guys and
the women ate lunch with the other women. Not me because I liked
working with women.
There was also a strict dress code at the bank.
Employees were expected to wear black pants, white shirt, black tie,
suit coat and and black shoes. I
got nailed by the boss once when I wore brown shoes. We never were in contact with the public so the whole idea of a dress code
was ridiculous. In fact we were hidden away on the third floor of the main
office on 5th street in downtown Portland. Nobody knew we were there.
We
just kept the computers running. So
why a dress code? Those days made little sense to me.
I worked in savings, BankAmericard (a credit card
system) and customer savings. I even helped make
the first online ATM system in Portland, and perhaps the first of it’s kind
anywhere in the world using actual online transactions. None of this type application
was available anywhere else but it was developed by a guy called Fast so
all the instructions had Fast names. The ATM machines were only used by
our internal customers in the credit card department.
The bank had a cafeteria in the same building and the
food was quite good. It operated
at a loss and sold a good lunch for 35 cents or so because employees would spend 30 minutes eating lunch
then go right back to work. If the employees went out to one of the many good
eating spots in downtown for lunch it could take an hour, so the bank figured the cafeteria was a
bargain. The bank got more work out
of its people.
Programmers at that time did a lot of job hopping because the
market was so fluid, and pay was going up very fast. Programmers were much in demand, especially the good
hot programmers, and
word got around who was good, and managers seemed
to know who the good programmers were. I
suspect I was a good programmer. I was getting $450 a month at the bank, big money then, but I got
another job offer of $650 which
was "an offer I couldn’t refuse". Imagine almost a 40% wage increase after working in an industry and
having just one year experience. But looking back,
you
couldn’t pay me a million for what I got into—that's right, the public sector. Yuck!
