Well I had a Seinfeld moment yesterday. The better half and I decided to take our separate bank accounts and merge them into one. When we went to her bank to close out her account, and withdraw the whopping $1.50 from her savings account (OK, she also had her most recent paycheck in there, too), we approached this bank teller who looked to be in her early 20s. As this relatively thin woman nervously typed in some numbers on her computer, one thing above all else stuck out at me. She had Man Hands. God damn were they Man Hands. How these sausages managed to push down only one key at a time were beyond me. The reason I noticed these Man Hands was because we were at her station for at least 10-15 minutes. The reason? She didn’t know the first thing about closing an account and had the old “Customer Service Representative in headlights” look. I’m not complaining, mind you, because this “headlights” feeling is one of the worst things anyone can experience, outside of unsuccessfully trapping a soccer ball with your inner thigh without wearing a jock strap. It’s funny when I hear some people who have never worked a customer-service job in their life complain when a cashier took longer than four seconds to give out proper change. Look, I know there are dipshits out there ringing registers, but not every cashier is a high school dropout who can’t perform basic match. My theory as to how normally bright people can suddenly clam up in situations like this isn’t because they can’t do the job, it’s that they aren’t used to be put on the spot like this. It’s like having to perform improv in front of an audience, and many people, especially if they’re new to something, just aren’t cut out for that sort of thing.

Believe me, I know this feeling. There’s nothing like thinking you can answer just about anything a customer asks you, and then getting thrown for a loop with the first customer of the day who asks you something. The only way to deal with these types of experiences is to live through them. For me the most aggravating of these situations is when you are giving a customer change and they throw the old “here’s a few extra dollars, now give me a $10 bill instead of $5 and three $1s. Like I said before, the actual math of this equation is simple enough, but when you’re into hour seven of your shift, have four other people waiting in line, and have another customer asking you a question about something else, it’s easy to get flustered. And when you pause for a few seconds to get an idea of what’s going on, the spotlight suddenly shines brighter on you, and your every action and reaction is being judged by a bunch of people who think you’re not worthy of earning your $6/hour wage. For the record, my way of dealing with this is to not let the customer’s “extra $2” get anywhere near the $8 in change I was about to give him. Once that transaction was complete, I would then take the $10 in loose bills, put it in my register, and give out a $10 bill. Simple, effective and foolproof. And the only way I learned this was by trial and error, and then even more error.

Back to the bank. So when this teller looked around for someone to help her out with a procedure she probably never had to do, and was only trained on for a few minutes when she started this job, what did I do? I stepped aside and worked on something else, trying to make her uncomfortable situation a little more bearable. I don’t know if it helped any, but it had to have been better than if I were to stand over her and impatiently tap my fingers on her counter.