Page 51 - A Banker Down the Rabbit Hole

11. Contesting the deadline of the

boss

I got transferred from the Administrative Office to the Metropolitan

branch. The officer I replaced, had been transferred to his native
city. He, however requested to stay for two weeks more. Till then,
I had to work as a "stop gap" in place of any officer going on leave
or being on outstation duty.

One day, I was waiting for assignment of duty in some department in
front of the Second in Command. The Chief Manager called me inside
his chamber and told me to prepare profiles of all the 60 odd employees
on a prescribed printed 4 page format. He indicated that it should be done
by that evening. I had read the columns of the format to be filled up and
it required a lot of time to go through the entire individual staff file and
get the necessary information from various documents filed from time
to time in that file and fill it in the format. There were no computers
used in the bank as unions were opposing the introduction of technology
in banking fearing large scale retrenchment just like the ongoing trend
of growing AI and Automation today in banking sector.

I just gave my estimate of time for work as 2-3 days to complete. He got
displeased and told me, "You have not started the work yet and instead
calculated the number of days this work would take." I felt bad but I knew
for sure that I was right and kept quiet as the boss was a very senior
elderly officer heading this branch. I started working on the task but in a
short while the officer whom I had to replace, was deputed for this task
and I was asked to take charge of his seat as an expression of annoyance
perhaps not trusting my time estimates.
By evening around 7 o'clock, I finished my work and got down-stairs and
found the officer still on the profile making task and huge number of files
still pending. I did not say anything and started doing the same task to

48 | A Banker down the Rabbit Hole