Well, maybe not quite! I meant to draw a comparison with the way computers have almost totally eradicated the Bank Clerk. We have not actually been killed as such and we are still around but our “skills” are just no longer required anywhere in the world. Of course, there is the catastrophic scenario of the Earth experiencing an overwhelming solar flare which triggers a C.M.E. (Corononal mass ejection) and knocks out every single electronic gadget on Earth – which scientists say nearly happened in 2012 – which could bring us back into focus and in demand again. If computers no longer work, who but the humble old-time bank clerk with his/her pen and ability to tot up long columns of figures in his/her head, could keep the banking system going?
I am a survivor of that fast disappearing generation of bank clerks. While I don’t go back as far as Dickens’” Bob Cratchit” style clerks, I too, just like Bob, have stood at a sloping desk, with a huge black ledger before me, a pile of cheques for posting and a trusty fountain pen in hand …… that’s all. No calculators or mechanical adding machines on which to add up all the amounts of the cheques being written in the ledger – just a nimble brain which can perform amazing feats of addition once trained.
I started in a three-man branch of Barclays. Unbelievable as it may seem now, the manager also doubled as a ledger keeper, while the accountant was also the teller. I was the junior clerk who did jobs like waste, bills, remittances, clearances, filing and best of all, customer statements. Those tiny, primitive Burroughs machines must have been at the very dawn of the age of mechanization. The workings were purely mechanical not electronic and the machines banged and clattered like anything. If the power was off, you simply added a handle to the side of the machine and carried on posting, albeit at a slower rate.
“Oom Jaap” my manager was a demon with figures, who seldom made a mistake. Competitively we pitted our “skills” against each other and I seldom won the competition of seeing who could make the least mistakes, when we “called over” the ledger and the statements. That same little Burroughs also did the waste, a process which I loved, especially the challenge of finding mistakes when the run did not balance. Savings accounts were similarly in big black books – somewhat smaller than current account ledgers – and posting was done in pen and ink as well. It was quite something to have to learn the myriad of little routines that made a typical banking day run well, all on the very first day.
I was in my initial branch for about 6 months and then was transferred to a five man branch. In this branch, the manager was excused handposting of the ledger and I stepped into that breach, despite my total lack of ledger keeping experience. This branch had a teller who was separate from the accountant. Boy, were they ADVANCED! I mastered the art of posting a ledger quite easily – basically all I had to learn to do was add and subtract quickly. While I’ve always been hopeless at maths, I can still add and subtract swiftly and accurately. I did well as a handposting ledger keeper. The day after I turned 21, I turned up for work after a party which ended at around 4 am. I was not even slightly hungover yet – a bit drunk sure, but not hungover! Amazingly I posted my ledger without a single mistake that day – probably the only time I ever managed to do so. (That was one in the eye for the Temperance League!)
My next job was as agency teller. No ledgers this time but a step backwards in my having to write up the waste instead of machining it all out. It was quite a job on a month-end when the agency was as busy as hell and there just was no time to write it all up and also get back to the branch in time to stave off overtime. At least my experience at adding in ledgers, came in handy.
My next stop on the ladder saw me in charge of staff and not using my “skills” much at all. I now had ladies who handposted the ledgers but had to keep resorting to adding machines (Still Burroughs) which were more plentiful at this branch. Those old Burroughs machines were like the Jeeps in the world of motoring – tough as nails and impossible to break. If one jammed, I’d simply pick it up and drop it on the floor. The hefty crash would invariably unjam the machine. Statements were done on Olivetti machines and savings department, which was huge in this branch, was still in big black book ledgers.
O & M Department took pity on us in due course and spanking new Odhner machines were brought in to replace the handwritten ledgers and Olivetti machines. The Odhners were fine Swedish machines but were very touchy and delicate electrically. The town then had its own power station and the voltages and amps flowing from it were pretty erratic – much depending on the sobriety of the generator minders generally. This was something the Odhners did not like and we once burnt out three machines in a single day, in an orgy of involuntary destruction. Hefty voltage stabilizers hastily were fitted to the machines which eventually saved the day. The ledger system was a single shot one – both ledger page and statement were produced at the same time. That was a huge step forward at the time. Wow!
The savings department also ran on the Odhners but the growth in numbers and volumes could no longer be effectively managed so O & M brought in a behemoth Olivetti Mercator machine which ran the ledger and calculated interest accrual all at the same time. It clattered, whirred and banged and did everything except blow off steam and despite being quite painfully slow, did streamline savings quite a bit. I never did find out how its “brain” worked – it seemed to be mechanical but might have been an early electronic one.
That damn machine nearly caused me to have a nervous breakdown during the February interest posting run during the first year with it. With some 12 000 accounts to post, the slow speed of that machine really became annoying, at first ……. and then catastrophic when a flipping Inspector walked in. Not the most patient man around, Uncle Bref Edwards wanted those ledgers balanced right away for his audit, which it was patently obviously impossible to do. The argument I had with the old guy is the closest I ever came to blikseming an auditor! Anyway, I undertook to keep that Mercator running day and night and my clerks would start at 5 am and work in relays deep into the following night. I slept very little during the crisis. Yet we passed muster, posted all the interest and balanced perfectly within two days. Even Uncle Bref was mollified. And then people wondered why we old-time bank clerks tended to drink a little more than was wise ….
Eventually I left the branch system and joined Inspection Department (Later Internal Audit). Here at least, my ability to cast long rows of figures came in useful, because we distrustful Inspectors actually used to hand cast run outs of balances to ensure no-one was trying to “pull a fast one” on us. Heavens, we were really a paranoic bunch back then! Moving from branch to branch I encountered a truly bewildering array of machines and systems. All manufacturers of bookkeeping machines were represented: Burroughs, NCR, Olivetti, Odhner etc It almost seemed as if O & M had rooted around in the company bargain bins and bought whatever was there, to dish out to the branches! I was most fascinated by the large NCR waste machines some of the bigger branches had. It was an impressive beast. The operator sat at an old-fashioned, multi-numbered keyboard and punched in codes and amounts. A bank of little postboxes faced the operator and lids would pop open in response to whatever code was input and the voucher would be dropped into the box. These machines reminded me of a set of pigeon nesting boxes and I whimsically would picture doves flying out of the boxes as the lids popped open. While in my younger days I could operate any of the machines the bank had, this waste machine was one I never mastered.
The march towards computerization had begun and the first salvos in this battle were fired. The general ledger went online via Siemens telex machines. These seemed quite miraculous machines at first. You would type something in Pofadder and a machine in Johannesburg would type exactly the same…. WOW! This was progress!
Come 1975 and computers were up and running. Massively secure computer centres were erected in all the cities and huge machines which punched little holes in paper tape started appearing in branches. There was another machine elsewhere which could read those rolls of punched paper tape and give the computers which were whirring away in their fortresses, the fodder which they required. Here suddenly were enormously expensive machines which basically could do what I used to with a pen and my brain, only much quicker and more accurately. These behemoths produced printed paper at an astounding tempo and one was alarmed as the world’s forests started disappearing as the demand for paper by the computers skyrocketed.
Those were concerning times especially for us auditors because we had little understanding of the risks involved with computers and I for one often left branches with the feeling that I had barely touched the surface of what was going on there.
Internal Audit Division also wanted to incorporate this amazing labour saving device in our procedures and the first laptops were dished out, to only the seniors at first. I recall collecting my little Texas Instruments black & white laptop in Johannesburg and bringing home it to show my mother. All I could do with it was switch it on! Mother was singularly unimpressed and to tell the truth, so was I. That first laptop had a hard drive of 64 mb capacity while the RAM was miniscule by today’s standards. I simply turned into a “Luddite” and handed the damn machine to my colleague, Bob Bullock and told him to go and fiddle with it. And fiddled Bob did, managing to actually start the spreadsheet program, Lotus 123 and progress to a wonderful thing called WYSIWYG. We were in awe of him …. for a while anyway! He had broken the ice and I hastily grabbed the machine back because gee, this could even be FUN. I couldn’t let Bob grab all the glory, for goodness sake.
Those early machines still ran on the Windows predecessor, DOS and before long I had bought my own Personal Computer and was eagerly grabbing every update of DOS as it came on the market. When the first Windows edition came out I was apprehensive because it had taken me much effort to master DOS and suddenly that hard won knowledge was obsolete. But Windows soon charmed me and I took to it like a duck to water. Internal Audit initially only used the machines as fancy typewriters on which we could produce our reports. We used Lotus 123 and Word Perfect. The latter was a swine of a program to master but master it we all did. Our working papers were eventually loaded onto the laptops and now we could REALLY produce paper! Our reports which used to be succinct and to the point were suddenly enormous piles of paper which nobody needed or read, but which looked damn good nevertheless. For a while at least half the time spent on an audit was taken up in that near Herculean effort needed to produce a report. I honestly don’t really know if our audits were much more than just perfunctory at this time, because there really wasn’t enough time to be thorough.
By now we had switched to Windows and ditched Word Perfect in favour of the Lotus program Word Pro along with Lotus 123. No sooner had we mastered these programs, than the bank as a whole changed to Microsoft Word and Excel and we had to start all over again. Somewhere along the line, Lotus Notes was also introduced – it’s a measure of the burnout I personally experienced that I cannot even remember well, exactly what we used Notes for! Computers had ceased to be our tools, equivalent to the pen and ink of old and were now our masters. These machines cost a helluva lot of money and our bosses had to justify their purchase by creating work for them. Whether they actually succeeded in finding ways for laptops to streamline our work is debatable. They soured my life beyond measure.
I asked for early retirement on the grounds of ill health but that was just a partial truth. I just could no longer work in a state of perpetual change, especially as much of the change I was experiencing, was futile and discarded almost as soon as it was created. I longed for those good old days when I had a big black book and a pile of cheques in front of me and I knew the purpose of what I was doing. I have no idea if the bank has now settled down and is using its technology to good effect or not. I must say it seems, from an outsider’s point of view, to be running quite smoothly. It’s just a pity the human interface the bank prided itself in having spot on, has unhappily gone to pot. The installation of “robotic” people in call centres has replaced that friendly human face we showed to the world once upon a time. But don’t mind me, I’m just a bit of an old Luddite now…………
Despite the hard times computerization gave me while I was in the bank, I’m still quite fond of computers. This old crock on which I am writing this still runs on Windows XP but does most of what I expect of it. I also have a laptop which runs on Windows 10 mainly for my blog. I have to admit that I would be lost without these machines now but I look back with pride on the years when I and a host of other bank clerks, were happily doing what the computers do today.
To all you old timers out there reading this, stand ready! If the sun suddenly hiccoughs and blows out all these fancy computers and things, we’ll be called back into the frontline again like a shot. If it never happens, well, I have it on good authority that St Peter still uses an abacus……..
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