Working in the Bank

When I walked into the Bank, I could sense that many eyes were following me around. That made me totally uneasy, but I could not run away, could I?It was my first day at work.
I looked around the premise,the building was really old, it was situated at Bank road, near to the Chinese Tua Pek Gong temple, which must had been at least one hundred years old.Our Bank premise was in fact a block of 4 and half stories shop house, it was in the middle of a row of coffee shops,hardware shop and grocery shops, typical type of china men building. The office furniture and fittings matched the building perfectly well, not surprisingly.I could remembered vividly some of the chairs were really ancient, brown in color, round seats,nevertheless quite comfortable to sit on.(Many years later, I saw the same type of chairs in the museum of Singapore) We did not grumble about the old looking office furniture,but initially I did feel a bit difficult to adapt in this run down environment. As I just came back from London, England was still fresh in my mind.We were using computers in the College ,but back home in Sibu,even banks were using manual and electrical typewriters only.Computer was not even heard of. Undoubtedly,we were many years behind the Western world .But life went on, and everyone was quite happy because we were rather complacent.
Every now and then, we would hear the pin point typewriters and manual typewriters clinging forward and back again.Our business was good,as this was the oldest bank in Sarawak. Quite often, the clerks just stood up and flashed their fingers over the typewriters, busy preparing bankdrafts while attending the customers at the same time.They were efficient workers I must say,as I was the remittances and loan office then.Junior officer, to be exact. I was given a probation period of 6 months, then, the management would confirm whether they would take me in as a class 3 officer.Luckily I was confirmed after 6 months and not longer,some officers were confirmed only after one year, which meant that they had to bear with low pay for 6 more months.
There were a lot of senior clerks at that time, most of them were form 5 school leavers.Many of them were proud of themselves,because to be able to secure a job in the bank was like striking a golden rice bowl,at least, it was, at that time.When I joined the Bank they were at least 10 or 15 years my senior, in term of age and experience.May be it was only natural that they were apprehensive towards us, their officers, whom in their eyes were "green and hopelessly useless", since they were far better than us in hands on experience .One day, while I was typing the telex message, one lady clerk was talking bad about us.She purposely raised her voice so that we could hear her remark.It went like this: "those peoples hold higher positions because they had "pan sai chua", (In Hokkien it means toilet paper).All the new graduate officers heard the remark, but none dare to stand up for ourselves.We were insulted but we had to keep low because their "gang" was powerful.At that time three words floated in my mind, humiliation and office politics.
However, I am glad that I had survived all those criticisms and sometimes unkindly gossips.It makes me see the different faces of peoples and learn to be more patient and forgiving.