When I was fresh out of High School, I migrated from my dish-washing job at The Overlook Restaurant to a “Night Operator” position at a Bank.
At the time, they still sent everyone’s canceled checks out via mail. In order to organize these checks for mailing, they had a giant check-sorting machine run by a mainframe which filtered the checks into 10 individual pockets, which you would empty and place into 10 individual trays. Then you would run the checks through the filtering process several more times, until they were all sorted by Account Number and could be placed into envelopes by other bank staff the next day.
Sorting those checks was my primary responsibility, and that took most of the 4 or 5 hours of my shift. But the bank’s brand new IBM AS/400 Mainframe also calculated all the day’s transactions and adjusted balances accordingly, a process that took almost my entire shift as well. I was responsible for monitoring this mainframe and dealing with any errors that cropped up. (They rarely did.) I also printed out all the day’s end reports before going home and stacked them in different stacks on a table so they could be distributed to their respective departments. As a final step, at about 2 or 3 AM (on a school night), my Brother would come and pick me up, and I took backup tapes from the computers to a deposit box away from the bank’s main building, so if a catastrophic fire erupted, the bank’s important data would not be lost.
When I first came to the job, I was trained by a dumpy, somewhat awkward young man (can’t remember his name) who was quitting because he was going to move away to get married to a girl he met on the Internet. He was a huge KISS fan, and forced me to watch one of his bootleg concert videos on VHS one night, an activity I absolutely loathed. (Not a big fan of KISS, myself.) He showed me the ropes, but at the time, the bank had yet to purchase a new mainframe and processing took over eight hours. Every Thursday night he would order a Hoagie from Domino’s Pizza and have them deliver it to a side door, a ritual that I inherited from him and continued until I left the job.
Shortly after I completed training and fully moved into the position, the bank purchased the AS/400 I mentioned above. My shift was cut in half due to that computer’s increased processing power, so I had to come in several hours early and help the other IT staff with various tasks. One of the staff members was an old woman named Mildred, and she absolutely hated my guts. I don’t know if she thought I was going to steal her job, or she just hated young whippersnappers like me, but she was always very cold, distant, and dismissive toward me. As a result, I began to resent her as well. I remember one time we encountered a bunch of communications errors with our various branches and she almost had a panic attack trying to deal with the situation. I thought it was rather exciting, myself.
The job was very boring. Before we got the new computer, I spent the “down time” waiting on the computer, and after sorting the checks, by playing through Fallout: A Post-Apocalyptic Role-Playing Game on my Boss’s computer. He didn’t like using a mouse – he preferred those keyboards with a little laptop-like “nub” in the center used for controlling the pointer. I wore that nub completely down when I was playing Fallout, and I remember a disgruntled grimace on his face as he carried the keyboard to the trash.
After we got the new computer, I had no time for playing computer games. Most of the night was spent sitting in a chair in front of the check-sorting machine, reloading the pockets as necessary. So I developed several tactics to deal with the boredom. I perfected the ability to fall asleep in the minute-long increments it took the pockets to fill, waking up just as a sorting pass completed to reload the pockets, then falling asleep until the next pass was complete. I also printed off a bunch of “MiSTings” from the web and read them, using hundreds of pages of paper in the process.
Let me describe these “MiSTings.” Mystery Science Theater 3000, a show where several comedians make fun of really bad movies, was huge at the time. (This was the mid-nineties.) So a fan-base grew up around it which took “fan-fiction” works from the Internet and added witty comments in between sentences, similar to how an episode of MST3K worked. I must have read hundreds of those “MiSTings.” They really weren’t that funny, and weren’t much better than the fiction they lampooned. I don’t know why I was so fascinated with them.
One of the “superstar” fan-fiction authors was a man named Stephen Ratliff, who wrote terrible Star Trek: The Next Generation fan-fiction in which a Mary Sue he created named “Marissa” basically took over every important function of the Enterprise. She was like a genius 14-year old girl who was a warrior, a diplomat, and a philosopher all at the same time. She ended up giving orders to everyone, and the entire crew bowed down to her slavishly. And for some reason, Ratliff had a fascination with horse-racing, so he would often “spruce up” his stories with extremely long descriptions of horse races, in which all of the crew members were just as interested as he was.
I made good money at the job, and since I was living with Granny Mabel and had next to no expenses, I used the income to save up $5,000 for my move to Lexington in 199X. To this day I occasionally have dreams that I’m working at the bank again, and invariably I’ve missed a tray of checks so that the sort gets fucked up, and I have to restart the entire 4-hour process from the beginning, staying until dawn to do so. That’s always a bad night.