Making Plans for the Year

Did you made your New Year Resolutions? I haven't. The only one I have so far is "post at least weekly at the Hungarian blog", but then I guess by the end of January I'll have all my resolutions outlined. Honestly, why to leave the whole thing for one day when you can think it better over 31 days? It's not like it's a regulation or something.

Today, the first workday of the year - though not mine yet - we've got a few things going on for the rest of the year. There weren't many errands to run, but one of the things I did was to set a savings planning account. This is a special type of savings account where you can monthly save a given amount of money - or more - but can't take it out until the contract is over. I decided to do this after much thinking and crunching numbers, in order to make sure I do save up some money for some future plans I have.

You know, sometimes, for some things, no matter how much you'd like it to work, you can't really always get with the program. You can't keep up with a diet, an exercise regime, savings plans, a book reading plan with a bookclub, or just with any club or program you may want to bring into your life. You may start these full of hopes and dreams, but as difficulties roll before you - and difficulties ALWAYS roll before you - and you get your first cracks and lags, you may fall a little behind your carefully planned program - which happens specially with things like weightloss, where you can't really plan ahead how much will you lose, and then you start losing less and less until you hit a proverbial plateau - and this can break your resolution and prompt you to quit. So what to do? How to make things work? Well, one of the ways is to make a program where you get help from sources outside of you.

Enroll into a program truly with the capacity to push you when you are lagging, or sign up with friends to do it. Sometimes it works to have help, have support and get the extra push from a third party, to get ahead with your plans. There's no shame in trying, and this can be what helps you get ahead. For instance, to get my University Degree and have my thesis done, it helped A LOT to do it with someone else - our University allows it, and often promotes it, so that less thesis have to be checked over, and they can all be easier programmed for defense -. When I felt hopeless, she lifted my spirit, and when she was about to throw the towel, I was ready to catch her and give her hope. We helped each other, stood by each other and shared the burden and the work. So it doesn't matter what plan you have, what you want to achieve, often having someone to do it with, someone to support and who supports you as well, is one of the best ways to get results.

However, remember that one thing VITAL to make any plan work is to know yourself and your capabilities. For instance don't propose to read 100 books in a year if you usually take a month to read a book either because you don't have much time to read books (others than those in your academic program, or those you need to read due to your work), or because you are normally a slowpoke reader. Trying out little, short-term tasks is the best way to measure up yourself and what you can handle. Things like List of 13 are good for this, even though these lists have been designed (by me, mind you) to be only about fun things.

Would you like to read more books? Make a mini task, like "read X books this month". Pick a relatively low number and see how you measure up to it, then go aumenting it month after month. Or pick something like "meditate once a week", "lose weight this month", "save up X amount of money this month"... or reverse things even, like "have a veggan day twice a week", or "have no unhealthy food this month"... or "spend less money on clothes/books/stuff", or "spend only X amount of money this month". Do you want to jump into it this year, no waiting about it? Well, it's up to you, but just in case, try out the mini tasks. Then, besides, your year doesn't have to start on January 1st, it could start the day of your birthday!

Whatever you decide to do, remember not to plan something that's over your capabilities - or what you can achieve in one year - seek to know yourself, and if things are a bit uphill, get help! I bet you can do it, and do it rocking!

Still a Teller

There are many types of jobs in a person's life - or at least there's a chance in anyone's life, to have many types of jobs. There are those you take because you need the money, those you take because you are bored and have nothing better to do, those you get involved in because you believe in them, and those you take to build a career. There are many, many more types of jobs, and regardless of them, usually there's one type (at least) that means everything to you. Whatever the conditions of this job or type of job, the lessons you learn with it are the ones that form you and brand you the most. Years can pass by and still those lessons are there always present, and even if your everyday life makes you lose them out of sight, they always find the way to be back in the center, burning and glowing like the embers that support the flame of your soul.

The first job of a significant type for me was as a teller at a bank. It was the first iob I've taken not to make money, but to work towards building up my career as an economist. The job was hard, perhaps poorly paid, rutinary and maybe even far away from the a "real job" economists do, but it was the first in a very rewarding process to become the economist I am today. And believe it or not, my two best friends from the University also started as tellers at the same bank. ^_^

The job of a teller is hard. From 8 am to 5 pm we worked directly with the customers, manning little glass boots and facing long lines of impatient, upset people that often took off their frustrations on us. We had to stay constantly alert, pay attention to any possible fake document or phony bills and checks, paying close attention to large sequences of numbers to make sure the right person was depositing or withdrawing money from the right account, or paying the right loan or mortgage. There was no time for a little break to surf on the net, nor space to kick back and read a book. Nine hours of this could easily get on anyone's nerves, but the real test came after the last customer was gone and you had to close, which is pretty much a daily close of books. This could take you a lot of time as all your transactions and the money you had in the register had to match. It didn't matter if the previous day you did good, if today you hadn't paid enough attention and were missing an important amount of money, or had entered wrong a transaction probably causing the bank and the customer a big damage.

In this job you didn't have an end of shift, but when you left home depended on how you closed the day, how much attention were you paying then, and had been paying through the day. In a way, after keeping in control, and doing a rutinaty, even mind numbing task all day long, trying not to lose it with people offending you or accusing you of their own lack of attention, or treating you as if the bank policies or National policies were nothing that an invention of yours, you had to then face the results of your day and your own working capabilities. You couldn't just pretend everything closed, ball up the whole thing and give it to the accountant, because then the accountant would go over the whole thing, and if there was something missing, or an error included, you would be called to answer the next day, and the results would come off your meager paycheck. Something as small as overseeing a wrongly dated check could mean that you would have to pay the amount of the check from your salary.

My direct boss back then, gave us a every important advise, and made sure to repeat it every day at different moments, specially when the tension was high and us tellers could be prone to mistakes just to get the huge line disappear. He said "slowly because it's urgent". It might sound strange, but it was one of the best advises, and one I have used since in cases of great pressure and great urgency. His words were meant for us to take our time, be careful, because by doing things fast as the urgency demanded them, we could commit many mistakes that then would take us more time to correct, and when correcting later we could start getting so tense we wouldn't be able to do things properly. At the bank, and specially at the teller section, conartists often used up the moments when the lines were long to creat confusion and slip a fake bill or a fake check, maybe even pile up many transactions and use the tellers desperation to get the line going, to steal money by pretending they had already given the money for the deposit,  claimng that the teller hasn't given them the right change because they paid with a larger denomination bill than they actually had.

At the end of the day, the desperation in those moments of rush would come out clear. The things you neglected, the shortcuts you took when you shouldn't have, the documents and bills you didn't test properly, the documents that have gone missing... all that shows. At the end of the day other things show to at the closing of books. Your shenanigans, the swindling, and though it is your cash and you can get rid of the "evidence" when nobody is looking, the treasury officer can decide to pop up at your boot right then and audit your cashier.

From my time as a teller I learned about pressure and working under pressure. I learned to count money faster, pay attention to long sequences of numbers, and also learned tricks to do it more efficiently. I also learned the valuable lesson that every day is a new day, and that you can't relay on your past success, but must make every day count and make every day a success. Also learned that today's failure doesn't mean that you can't succed tomorrow. One of the most important lessons I learned was to fo the daily close of books.

In some jobs it's harder to do it, but it's never impossible. At the end of the day, at the end of the period, look back, fish out all the slips, count the cash you have still in your cashier, your experiences, your joys and your sorrows, the overtime you've done with the results you have achieved, and close your books, balance your cash, measure your day.

In a way, whatever you do, however you decide to live your life, work and follow through your projects and duties, you'll have to do a close of books. Now or later, and I don't mean it as "when you die" or "when you come close to death". No, you never know when are you going to be called on to give account of what you have been doing. It could be in a meeting, when out of the blue one of your jobs is pulled out and you need to explain what you did and why, or it could be at an impromptu "activity report". It could be when you are applying for a promotion and you are asked to resume your achievements in your current job, or it could be at a new job interview. Sooner or later you will be asked to give account of what you have done, so are you sure of what you have done? Are you sure you know what will come up? Are you ready and calm about a possible auditing of your books?

And not only in your job, but on many other of the spheres of your life, are you ready for ggiving account of them?

Yes, I'm still a teller. I live in my glassbox and face the pressure, mutter to myself the lessons passed on by those savvier than me, and do my work not only trying to do my best at the moment, but also looking forward to my daily closing. So yes, please "slowly because it's urgent", you don't want to mess it up.

BN - No Blessin' in there

Today I was reminded about the beauty of Customer Care. Well, the BN here in Costa Rica does go the extra mile for the customer. I've to pay the Oriflame bill at this bank and I can do it only at this bank. It wouldn't be so bad, except that this one bank is famous for the following thing:

1. HUGE queues.
2. SLOW service
3. Too much red tape for everything
4. Fees for EVERYTHING, far more than in anyother bank, private or state owned, or all of them put together. They even have the face to charge for the upkeeping of the account when they do nothing for it.

It's also the only bank I've seen shamelessly lie on a Balance State for the pension operator, saving the red numbers by counting all the fees charged to the clients for every little bit. In other ways, this bank can't make a single profitable buiness, but covers the expenses with more and more fees, taking from the poor and stuffing the pockets of the rich. A reversed Robin Hood. Oh, and that picture is of a queue at one of the bank's branches... 15 minutes before opening. That line took two hours to get to the teller.

It is so upsetting that the bill of oriflame can only be paid there, so I have to find ways to get to the bank, many of which branches open at 8:30 and close between 15:30 and 16:00. Thanks to a meeting that ended up early (it was both un-productive and very educating at the same time), I managed to get in time to this one office in Heredia, which closes by 18:00, time I normally don't make it. Well, there's more to it. In order to enter the bank, you have to cross an automat teller machine hall and then walk through a double door, much like the ones in many airports (Charles de Gaule has them). Between the doors you are scanned for metallic objects, and if you are carrying them, you are requested to leave them at some lockers. There's no guard on the side of the lockers and the lockers look easy to pic. Naturally, I was loaded with metal: cellphone, coins, wires, PDA, hairpins, compact, metal tipped fountain pens... I wasn't going to leave my bag in such an unsafe place, but talking every single metal thing from it wsa too much of a hassle, particularly because it could all be stoled while I did what was looking like another 2,5 hour queue.

So I left. There was no other branch close, and it really upset me that they were so concerned about THEIR safety that they didn't think about the customer's safety or comfort.

The Banco Nacional is an epitome to the anti-Custormer Care.

Blah Wekend

I'd love to say that this was a peaceful and quiet weekends where I've got to rest and recharge with new energy, but it wasn't really so. First of all, I had plans for my Saturday, and they came crumbling down thanks to one lovely bank. Okay, okay, I didn't start my day on time, and I was delayed by: 1. trying to finish a letter in time, 2. babysitting my nephew, and 3. Skype-ing with my boyfriend. The day's tasks included going to the Post Office to mail a letter, which didn't happen because I've got there five minutes late. I was to go to the Banco Nacional to do a payment for the Oriflame account, which did happen... with a lot of difficulty, and then to go to the UCR and check on some material about artisanal fishing. This last one didn't happen due to the second task.

You see, I checked on the website of the bank which branches would be open and close to home. There was one that was supposed to be open from 9 am to 1 pm. Was it? No. Unlike in the website, on the door it said that it was opened from Monday to Friday. Hyne, if I would have been a cashier in a bank with that kind of schedules (from 8 am to 3 pm), I'll still be working there. So, I had to go to another branch. This one was in this commercial center. It opened at 1 pm, and since I arrived at 12:40 I thought I'll be one of the firsts. Big mistake. The line before the bank was DOUBLING the length of it. They didn't open at 1 pm, as they were supposed to, but later, and allowed in just some customers, so that the bank wouldn't look crowded, letting the rest of us standing there. Wel, for someone who stood in the queu fifteen minutes before the actual opening hour, I was let in in the FOURTH batch of customers. Inside you could sit, but it's not like at home in the Raiffeisen or any other decent bank. Oh no. In here it looks worse than the public health center. Add to it, for amusement you can watch Animal Planet, the only place where that disgraceful "Crocodile Hunter" seems to keep living. Hell, and here I thought I would no longer be bothered by his assholeness. Why can't they keep dead people dead?

After two short hours, and a hell of a starving, I finally managed to get through with my three minute transaction. I was too tired and too annoyed to get on two buses all the way to the UCR and try and find something usable about "artisan fishermen" when truth to be told, why in the fucking hell would we need any of that stuff when we have experts and we have read enough material already?

So I went home, popped in Henry and June and relaxed, slept and did nothing.

Thing is, people, there's a sad fact: private enterprises are shit because unless you are a big muckety-muck, they won't even talk to you unless it is to squeeze money from your pockets. Public enterprises, on the other hand pretend to be the non-plus-ultra because they are "State owned", so they are like "of the people", and so they think they can treat you like crap.

They are all disgusting.