Years ago I had a friend who was a few decades older than I. He was a wonderful curmudgeon of a man. When I first met him he was struggling to care for his wife who was suffering from a wide variety of illnesses. They lived in a small town in Southwestern North Dakota and the pair traveled to Rochester, Minnesota to the Mayo Clinic for her care on several occasions. Bill had served in the United States Army in the European Theatre during the Second World War. He had been a military journalist, covering special stories for The Stars and Stripes Newspaper among several different assignments. One of his reporting tasks involved being present at the liberation of several concentration camps toward the end of the war. He didn’t talk very much about his war experiences, but on occasion I would get “I’ve never told anyone before” stories from him. Since I was also friends with his daughter, son, granddaughters and grandsons, I would always respond to those stories by encouraging him to tell them to his family. I think that he did share some of them with his family, but it was difficult for him. He had been ordered not to speak of much of what he had witnessed and he had kept silence for nearly four decades by the time I met him.

Bill had other stories as well. One of his stories involved a brief time when he worked at the local bank when he was a young man. I’m not sure if his time at the bank had been before he went to the war or immediately after, but it was many years ago when I heard him tell the story. The story did, however, contain the name of one of the elders of our community who had made his career as a banker. It was the same bank where Bill’s son-in-law was an officer when I first met him.

I won’t be able to tell the story as well as Bill and writing it separates it from the twinkle in his eyes, his ever-ready smile, and wonderfully engaging laugh. Here is the gist of what he told me.

He had been charged with stating cancelled checks. He was given a stack of checks that had been processed by the bank and were set to be returned to the account holders with their statements back in the day when having a checking account involved having the actual paper checks returned after they had been cancelled. He had a rubber stamp and a stamp pad and was seated at a metal desk in a small office behind the tellers. He was stamping checks one day. Bill was methodical and he definitely had his own pace, whether telling a story or performing any other task. When I knew him he was an on-the-air personality on our local radio station and one of the stars of a very popular call-in show called “This, That, and the Other” or “TTO” for short. He’d amble through the news room into the studio at his own pace, often causing the other radio voices to stall while he got settled. He hd a bit of a reputation around the radio station for throwing off the timing of programs.

Anyway, back when he was working at the bank, his boss, a senior bank officer, stopped in while he was stamping cancelled checks. As he told the story, Bill made the motion of stamping, hitting his fist on the table once to indicate when the stamp hit the ink pad and a second time when it hit the check, then he’d make a motion with his other hand to demonstrate moving the check to another pile before repeating the motion. In his version of the story, his boss chastised him for being so slow and told him to speed up his work.

Bill responded by adding a new sound to his slow motion. After hitting his fist to indicate the stamp on the ink pad, he rocked his arm and hit his elbow on the table. He then hit his fist, showing the stamp on the check, then hit his elbow on the table one more time. In his demonstration, the checks were being stamped at the original speed, but there were twice as many thumps on the desk and it sounded like he was working twice as fast.

Bill rocked with laughter as he told the story. His laughter probably spurred a coughing fit. Bill was a chain smoker and did a lot of coughing in those days. It was impossible not to laugh at the story when Bill told it and I heard him tell it on several occasions and treasured it each time he told it.

I think Bill might have hd some sympathy for the workers at Wells Fargo who were disciplined recently. It turns out that these bank employees had been working from home since the Covid-19 pandemic. The bank was using sophisticated equipment to monitor their work habits on bank-owned computers. The bank installed sophisticated software on the computers that track eye movements, take screen shots, and log which websites are visited by the computers. The employees were employing high tech devices to evade the surveillance. Among the devices used by the employees were devices called “mouse jigglers” which are widely available online and make computers appear to be more active than they actually are. The bank employees were fired or asked to resign “after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work.”

It appears that there is a bit of a game of high tech cat and mouse with the employees seeking ways to make the employer think they are working harder or being more productive than is actually the case and the employer trying to monitor employee activity to enforce work standards. It is a game that I think old Bill would appreciate even though he died before personal computers were common and working from home was unheard of in the banking industry. Bill was a bit of a rebel all of his life and would be rooting for the employees of the large corporation which, in his opinion, could probably afford to pay them regardless of their output.

I’m sorry that the bank employees lost their jobs, though I might have said that they should have been able to see the action coming since they were defrauding their employer. I wouldn’t advocate for such behavior. Somehow, however, I think my friend Bill would have appreciated the employees ingenuity and celebrated their ability to get away with it even if it was only for a short amount of time.

Bill never did tell me the story of how his employment at the bank ended or how he got into Radio as a career. It might be an interesting story.