Beautiful World

“Yes sir, Mr Solts, I will take care of it, and I will let my staff know how they need to proceed next time this issue comes up. We won’t be having this conversation again. Thank you for your patience with me being a newly appointed supervisor.”

I left my bosses office totally cut down to my legs, so it seemed. After all the instructions I’ve given to my staff, someone still processed a check for deposit on one of our special and long term clients, and put a 10 day hold on it, without asking any of us more experienced tellers about the deposit before putting it through.

So tomorrow, I will have another training session on this type of deposit and make sure our special clients file is up to date with all of their names and the types of transactions they usually come in with, but this time, I will have a sign-off sheet and all of my staff will sign it stating that they have been trained on this subject. I will also make each and every one of the attendees say the names of all the special clients, in hopes that when one of them walk into our office the name on the deposit slip will ring a bell with the tellers. I am also going to set up a special file for deposits over $20000.00 that I will check at the end of each day to make sure all deposits are processed correctly.

My boss, Mr. Hoffman assured me that there would be disciplinary action for me if this happened again to one of our special clients. I actually started crying on my way home. Having held my position for only 4 months, I just couldn’t bare the thought of being demoted already.

I took the long way home so I could calm myself down before walking in the door to my house, and everybody expecting to see me with a smile on my face which is the norm.

I turn down my street and hit the garage door opener and pull in, then my son, Trevor is at the door waiting for me to get out of the car. “Hi Babe, how are you tonight?”

“I’m fine Mom, but Lisa is crying her eyes out,”

“What’s the matter with her?” I ask,

“She’s babbling about some project that she was supposed to have today, and she didn’t so she just stood in front of the class crying because her Mom is too busy to help her make a project.”

“Oh no, I even had put a note to myself about helping her with the project, but I have had a few issues at work to deal with and I totally spaced it.”

We walked into the kitchen from the garage, and there she was on a stool at the counter with a box of Kleenex and probably the reddest eyes I’ve ever seen on a 9 year old. I put my briefcase down on the floor where I put it everyday with my purse and I went over and gave her a big hug and told her I would take her to school in the morning and go in with her and talk to the teacher to see what we could do to fix it.

Talk about feeling like I didn’t deserve to be a mother or a supervisor or even a person, my self esteem was crawling around on the floor, the only thing that would at least allow me to get calmed down was a hot shower. I helped my husband Steve finish dinner and get it on the table but I couldn’t eat anything so I drank my glass of iced tea and after cleaning the dishes off the table I went to take a shower and go to bed. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep very well, but when it was time to get up I had renewed energy and a focus to make things right with all of my world. I took her to school, thank goodness the teacher had arrived early so she was in her classroom and was pleased to see us come in. After I had explained the situation to her, she was more than willing to let us have another chance at the project, and today was Thursday, there would be time for us to present our project on Friday right after the lunch break. Lisa was ecstatic and I told her we would discuss the plan for tomorrow when she came home today and I would be there with project items.

I headed off for work, and the things that I had to implement for my staff was on my mind. I walked in the door of the office and let the receptionist know that we will be having a meeting, everyone needed to attend, at 8:30 sharp, because we open the doors to the public at 9am.

I started the meeting with sharing what the client felt when the person they had written the check to tried to negotiate it and it was declined at the teller window. The check had been written to a construction company who was adding on another room to their home so her parents could come and live with them due to them having Alzheimer’s, and they could no longer live independently. So now the parents are living with them and the clients’ kids are sleeping on the floor so the Grandparents have a bed to sleep in. Due to their age they are too inflexible to get on the floor, that would just create more issues for the whole family.

That was one issue, the other issue was that the check was drawn against a statewide credit union, and it was a cashiers check so there wasn’t a reason to put a 10 day hold on it in the first place. I reiterated that if you have a question about the validity of a check to please check with one of us and see if there’s a reason to put a hold on a check.

We finished the meeting with going through the file of approved clients and we opened the doors right on time. After the meeting, I worked until after everyone had had their lunch break and then I took off to go and get items for the Lisa’s project.

When I was a child, my father was in the Navy and at one point growing up we were stationed in Japan, where I learned about flower and how to make an origami ball. These things are very easy to make and  Lisa and I discussed the plan last night. I would make the Ikebana arrangement at home and bring it to school,  then we would teach the students to make an origami ball to take with them, that way when they looked at the ball, they would also remember the Ikebana arrangement.

I went to a local flower shop, I purchased an oblong flat bowl, bright green. Then I added pink mums, 3 of them and a sprig of manazita bush with no leaves or any sign of life and a sprig of baby’s breath.

These items are all that is needed to make an Ikebana arrangement: Ikebana is seen as a way to bring the beauty of the entire natural world together by reflecting harmony and balance between opposing elements. As an example, life and decay, full and empty spaces, extravagance and simplicity; which is done by evoking emotions in the person that is viewing the arrangement. A withered flower and a new bloom would be an example of life and decay, which is why I purchased the items that I did.

I went home, assembled the arrangement, then I took some pages of colored printer paper for the origami balls that the students will make and I headed to the school.

We were an instant hit with the students, first we put the arrangement on the teacher’s desk; we gave a little bit of information about the Ikebana art of flower arranging. After answering the questions from the students,  we handed out the paper, and begin to instruct them on folding an origami ball. We went through one step at a time, and when they were finished and blew into the paper ball and it actually inflated, the kids were ecstatic. We were the last presentation, and Lisa had a beaming smile on her face, instead of a dead beat Mom, now I was a hero Mom and everybody was Happy. I felt like it was great to be a human being again and my beautiful world is under control again.

Life is what you make it but sometimes extenuating circumstances assist in making it difficult to move forward.