Bank Ordeal

Today will be quite a day to remember for me. It was an hour long ordeal in a nationalised bank, to obtain a pass book entry. I went very early in the morning, at about 8:30. The bank was under renovation, and when i entered, it looked as if it was going to be torn down. The officials, i could see, were unprepared for what was expected, that customers would find this grossly inconvenient. When i entered, i found my footwear stamping on something squishy; it was the freshly laid cement on the flooring inside. There were hardly any officials inside, and i found 2 people who were trying to begin their day's work. I was instructed to go to the first floor to obtain the entry, and when i went there, i found half a dozen people waiting in a queue for a person who wasn't there, the one who would record their pass books. The fans were not working, and we were sweating it out, when a man came and sat in the counter, and said, "This counter is for all savings bank transactions except recording entries, please go down". An elderly gentleman next to me sounded irritated when he said that we were being taken for a ride. We marched our way downstairs, only to find no one. After 15 minutes, the officials were trying to find out what was wrong with the computer. Then they made a startling discovery that the spike-buster was not working and fixed it with great effort. At last, now it will be over in a few minutes, i thought. But No.. The person in the counter was desperately searching for a mouse pad, poor lady, she did not know that an optical mouse requires only a flat surface such as the table, and does not mandate a mouse pad. Finally, when all was well, the first pass-book got stuck in the printer, which started making all sorts of weird noises, like a formula-1 car in the race track. The counter person called for help, then a guy came and pulled out the pass book with all force, that it almost tore. I felt as if i was in the middle of a remote village, where people were just learning to use computers. There is a serious issue here. When a majority of the employees in the bank counters have been used to giving the manual system are suddenly asked to switch over to computers, and perform operations so simple just as entering numbers, their mindsets just do not seem to aid them. I just pray that today's was just a one-off case. Imagine standing in a queue that does not move, and even when it does, it ensures that the cost of getting the work done is greater than the return got.