Working their guts out to ease an unprecedented crisis

After putting in long hours of work under extreme stress, lack of acknowledgement has left the bank staff dejected.

November 12, 2016 12:00 am | Updated December 02, 2016 03:05 pm IST - KOCHI:

Even as people’s hardships at banks and ATMs hogged the attention, the plight of bank staff who worked their guts out over the last two days went largely unnoticed.

After putting in long hours of work under extreme stress, lack of acknowledgement left them dejected, even hurt.

“We worked till after Thursday midnight and then returned at 8.30 a.m. this morning. But all we hear is about the problems at banks. It seems a thankless job,” a senior banking official said on condition of anonymity.

Most banks had asked their staff to stay back late into night on Friday to get the ATMs up and running by Saturday. Some bank employees complained that they got hardly afewminute for lunch on the day.

They have given up weekend holidays

“The bank staff are putting in a lot of hard work. They have been handling unprecedented crowd and have given up their holidays this weekend to meet the situation,” said V.K. Premachandran, deputy general secretary, SBI Officers Association, Ernakulam.

Staff at most of the bank branches looked haggard and weary after the uncompromising workload. They not only had to exchange Old High Denomination (OHD) currency bills, accept deposits and issue withdrawals but also had to pacify customers agitated over ATMs remaining closed.

When stress takes a toll

Charley, a security guard at an ATM centre near Palarivattom, usually finishes reading the day’s newspaper in an hour.

But on Friday, he could hardly finish the first three pages as he was kept busy turning away anxious customers who had started trooping in as early as 5.30 a.m.

It was the same story across the city on a day when ATM centres were supposed to throw open their doors after two days’ closure.

A few meters away Prasad, another security guard, sat outside the ATM centre of a new generation bank with droopy eyes and weariness written all over his face. He had to do a double shift from Thursday morning.

“The bank staff had stayed back until midnight and cleared the ATM of Rs.500 and Rs.1,000 notes. Now it has to be loaded and that may happen only by afternoon,” he said when it was just past 6.30 a.m. He proved right.

In fact, only a small number of the 1,250 ATMs in the district had turned operational by evening. Unsurprisingly, long queues could be seen outside the ATMs which were up and running by afternoon. The closed ATMs either kept the shutters down or simply put up boards of ‘renovation’ or ‘maintenance.’

Vijayakumaran Nair, a security employee, briskly walked into an ATM near Palarivattom Bypass Junction, which had no such external ‘symptoms’, only to return with his hopes dashed.

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