Wednesday, October 10, 2007

job hunting again, finally fall

I haven't posted anything lately because the job I started in July wasn't going very well and ended last Friday by mutual agreement. I will miss the money and the people I worked with but not much else. I had never worked in banking or as a teller so it was something new, but from now on it has gone into my "been there, done that, won't do it again" column. It was too fast paced, involved too many details and decisions that had to be made too quickly with the possibility for too many errors. No matter how hard I tried there was always something I missed or an error waiting. They said that mistakes were no problem because they could be corrected. Well (very long well), yes and no. Yes the mistakes could be corrected but too often it took the person who had to find the mistake too long to find and correct it during which that person and I were both off line. Needless to say the customers piled up. And those mistakes the customers found made for some very unhappy customers.

I did learn a number of things during the last three month, which made this a very stressful learning experience. Normally I consider learning experiences good; but, right now I am still unwinding. I did find out that I really, really hate being responsible in any way for other people's money. My accuracy has for the last several years been pretty good. Upwards of 98%. However, there are some jobs where that is simply not good enough. Think about it any way you like, in tellering it simply isn't good enough. If you handle 100 checks a day you will make a mistake of varying severity each day. If you are typing information into the system every 100 characters will include 2 mistakes. No matter how hard I tried I could not develop methods of checking that reduced the mistakes to a reasonable, for the job, level. And the stress of trying to improve simply ensured that I made more mistakes.

So, I am looking for a new job. Unfortunately, everything I see out there is more of what I have seen before: retail and other sales jobs which detest and have been trying to get away from for God only knows how long, medical for which I have no interest, training, experience or temperament, tellering for which I am not at all suited. All of the employment boards (Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, etc.) only provide more of the same. I haven't found one yet that gives me interesting leads.

Oh, well!!! On to a change of topic.

It has been a disappointing fall so far. When I came back east from Colorado many, many years ago, I looked forward to autumns with colors other than aspen gold. I did miss the bronzes, reds, rusts and other colors the trees in the midwest developed when the weather got colder. This year so many went from green to brown to bare in the blink of an eye. The colors that did appear were dim and somewhat washed out. So many trees couldn't decide what to do. Patches were bare while others had some fall color and yet others were still green. It was a pleasant surprise when I went out today to see them finally deciding to change. Perhaps the weather has simply been too warm. Last Friday, Saturday, and Sunday we had high 80s to 90, more suited to July and August than early October. Finally, yesterday we stayed in the 70s and last night dipped into the 40s. I am in a sweatshirt today. The trees seem to be rejoicing and so am I. I have been more than ready for fall.

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