The Sootnoob Banker - Part II

Have you ever had one of those jobs which fills you with palpable dread and foreboding the minute you begin thinking about the next day of work? I have. But I’m pleased to say this entry isn’t going to talk about that. In truth, my first weeks of training at RBC have been educational, interesting and, dare I say actually rather enjoyable?
    It took a long time to get established at RBC. Due to all the accommodations, paperwork and vacation to Michigan, I ended up starting training a month after my original start date. I mentioned in passing the accommodations assessment. Essentially it was an hour of me explaining every facet of myself and my blindness to a lady who took meticulous notes and asked a lot of questions. In the end, we established that I would need three things. A screen reader (Jaws in this case) to read the vast flow of information. A screen magnification program  which will allow me to navigate, and read everything on my computer screen. And a desktop magnifier. This will allow me to read the various evil works of paper handed to me, such as cheques, bills, pieces of ID and sloppily written robbery notes. Here’s hoping that last doesn’t happen. In addition the bank also ordered me not one, but two 24 inch computer monitors. I’m not sure why they did two, and in truth I wasn’t sure how helpful even one would be. But I’ve found it makes things a great deal easier, and I am very thankful to have it.
    Special mention must be made to my Smart View desktop magnifier. It’s essentially a large computer screen with a swivel arm-mounted camera which pans 360 degrees. With it I am able to see straight across a room or down a long hallway in vivid detail. I can pick out the details of someone walking thirty feet away. To put it in perspective, I I’d be able to see a person at five feet. I’d know their gender and a few general features. Ten feet and I’d only be able to tell you there was a person standing there. This piece of equipment revolutionizes how I see. It also acts as a means of reading text and seeing the minute details in objects. Imagine thinking a piece of cloth is a solid color with no pattern, only to zoom in and discover a spectrum of vivid designs you didn’t even know it held. It’s a whole new way to see, and if they ever succeed in miniaturizing it to the point where it becomes completely portable, life might just get a whole lot simpler.
    I am pleased to report that there was enough put in place at the dawn of my first day at RBC to make participating in the e-classroom learning programs more or less accessible. I am still waiting for a screen reader, but the magnification program I use does have reasonable screen-reading capabilities which I’ve been able to adapt to.

    My first few days of training were spent familiarizing myself with the branch, new accessibility software and pieces of RBC communication software – Microsoft Outlook, Office Communicator (Like Messenger) and a program called SABA. This last is a program which coordinates our e-classroom learning. We have thirty-two students in BC, Alberta, Ontario and somewhere in the North-west Territories. We meet via voice over IP for one to two classroom sessions every day. These sessions, while primarily educational are extremely interactive. We are encouraged to ask questions and discuss the answers. There is a fair bit of book learning too via an online E-campus. But some of that is out-of-date, and so we’re asked to focus primarily on the class notes and learning binder. The material started off simple enough, but more on that later. The only problem is that good old SABA uses a lot of features which a totally blind person would be lost with, such as an interactive white board which can show anything from notes, to power-point slides, to the instructor’s computer screen itself. This means I usually have to read text visually, which is something I don’t do very fast.
    It’s been a little difficult getting accustomed to everything. But that’s alright. Before I even started I had the opportunity to talk to a lady in Kamloops who has worked for RBC for two years. She too is visually impaired, though to a lesser extent. It’s been really great talking to her. I felt a great deal better after doing so. She also introduced me to the Reach program, which is a sort of support group for RBC employees with disabilities. But it gets better. My instructor is extremely understanding and willing to accommodate anything I need. She sends me documents electronically, and though they’re in PDF format, they are pretty easy to navigate through. In addition I am in contact with an IT specialist in Ontario who knows a fair bit about JAWS, and Zoom Text. Knowing I can have accessibility questions answered makes me feel much more confident. That knowledge that if something really doesn’t work, RBC will attempt to find ways to make it work is something I’ve never had before.
The support doesn’t stop there. In truth, I have been overwhelmed by how supportive and genuinely interested people in the branch are with me. Everyone is incredible there. They aren’t just people who work at the same place. They’re people who work together. Cheesy perhaps, but accurate. I’ve never experienced a positive environment quite like this. It’s miles away from my time at NCO. They treat me like a human being – a co-worker who is valued an interesting as a person. They are interested in my blindness too, and I’m completely okay with answering their questions.
    The training program itself is really as easy as we make it. At least that’s what I’d like to think. I’ve learned a great deal about how to facilitate day-to-day transactions. In truth I understand the how of the job reasonably well. The when on the other hand is certainly a brain-full. They teach you in a very black-and-while manner. This is what you need to conduct this transaction, this is how you obtain it, this is when you ask for that, and this is how you recognize this. Was that confusing in a vague, uninformative sort of way? Well that’s sort of how I feel. I soon learned that there is a lot of gray to this job, and a lot of it has to do with common sense. We’re quickly taught to act on instinct when dealing with suspicious transactions. This is money. And because money makes many people’s worlds turn we’re taught the various ways to recognize fraud and money laundering. And all that is pretty easy. But the sheer amount of information and policy is staggering! There are forms to fill out, and forms detailing how to fill out those forms … Okay, perhaps I’m embellishing a little. But you get the idea. The information is vast, and many times I find myself drowning in it. And even in that everyone’s been very supportive. It’s been drilled into me that there’s no way to accumulate all that information without experiencing transactions first hand. All of this will come in time, and it’s important to step back at times and realize you don’t need to memorize everything.
    And so we come to the other aspect of the training: on-the-job experience. I’m beginning my fourth week of training on Tuesday, and already I’ve had a reasonable amount of experience dealing with living, breathing RBC clients. Of course at this time I’m only an active observer. I can interact with the clients who come in, but because I don’t yet have any equipment set up on the front lines, I can’t process any transactions. I just know that as soon as I can do so, many of the concepts I’m learning will fall into place. For now, I’m learning to just be me. I have been told I am pleasant and interact well with the clients. That makes me feel good, because this is one of the most important aspects of my job. Anyone who dislikes working with a wide variety of people need not apply, let me tell you.
    While I have been unable to perform transactions on the front lines, I have had the opportunity to play around with some of the tools which RBC employs to perform various tasks. They are all quite straight-forward and intuitive. They’re also very keyboard and screen-reader friendly, which makes navigating and utilizing them much easier than I ever dreamed it would be. There are hotkeys and other commands which allow for easy and swift keyboard navigation. I’m quite confident that after some time I will be as fast as anyone else on the technical side of the job.
    This brings me to my only real concern with the job, and it is the one that many of my visually impaired readers may be wondering about. This would be the sheer amount of paperwork involved in the job. We’re talking cheques, money-orders, bills, bank statements, forms, bills, cheques, cash, cheques and of course, that ever daunting robbery note. Now, I haven’t written anything aside from a few slight notes and general signatures since I was in grade 1. After that I began reading and writing Braille, and now that I’m out of high school, everything’s electronic. I find myself needing to relearn how to write, or even print. There won’t be a ton to write, but there will be enough to make relearning necessary. I’m concerned about this because I don’t write well, and I don’t write fast. It’s also hard for me to write, even when the paper is magnified because the way my magnifier works, a camera is pointed at the piece of paper, and when I move my hand to write, my hand obscures the page. It’s writing blind in a different way! More daunting yet is the sheer amount of penned writing I’ll need to read visually. Signatures, dollar amounts, messages,. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you’ve got a client waiting, and you can’t read their writing, you can’t really act fast. And let me tell you dear readers, nearly all the people who come in might see better than me, but you wouldn’t know it with their penmanship! When you get to the point where you can’t even read your own printing, you might want to consider other options.
    Many of my previous fears were laid to rest when I realized this isn’t a job that demands immediate action. It’s okay to take a moment to look over everything. Better that then cashing a fraudulent cheque because you didn’t make sure the cheque was authentic. Everyone I’ve shadowed there takes their time, and rarely do clients get impatient. I think after a while I’ll be alright.
    There’s just one more thing for me to tell you, dear readers. Last week was “Employee appreciation week”. Every day we spin a wheel to win prizes. The first two days I one two paid hours off. Perfect for going to get myself a much-needed haircut! They also fed us Tim Horton’s breakfast on Tuesday, A Pizza lunch on Wednesday, and a delicious barbecued lunch on Friday, a day where we all had the opportunity to strip off our suits and skirts (at home) and come into work wearing jeans and only semi-dressy shirts. It was great!
    That Friday night a number of us hopped on a multi-seated bike and rode around the Woodgrove vicinity to raise money for the Heart and Stroke Foundation. The bike had three columns of seats, with maybe ten or more seats to a column. They put me, the resident blind guy front and center on the bike. Had they also expected me to steer us around the streets, the night might have ended quite differently. But the steering was done by the man to my left, and so together we all raised a few thousand dollars. Not bad for a hard twenty-minutes peddling.
    There’s little more I can think to say. The past few weeks have been very interesting. I am pleased to call myself an RBC employee, and I look forward to the weeks ahead. I’m sure it won’t always be as great as it has been, but for now it’s been a great experience, and I’m excited to see where it will all lead.

Remy's rants - My job situation and those who complain about theirs

Hey everyone. Remy here. I’m in a really frustrated mood right now, and I feel the need to unload an enormous ranty blog all over this page!

We all know jobs are hard to come by in this day and age. Right now the job market sucks more than a flushing toilet And if you don’t know that then you’ve either won the lottery, managed to remain in the industry you started in, got extremely lucky, or you live off the government and don’t really care.

This brings me to my first point: I need a job. I need a job like a drowning person needs air because right now, I’m drowning in feelings of social and financial inadequacy. I feel … well to be honest I feel friggin disabled. I feel like a dog might feel after being neutered. Sure he’s still loved, sure he can still play and run and pee anywhere he wants …. But there’s something missing. He’s half a dog. And right now I feel like half a man … the bottom half. Every time the parents or the in-laws call , it’s the same old tired tale. “I’m still looking.” “I’ve got an interview.” “I just got rejected again.” Those are the three variants of “that” conversation.

“What, do you have a piano tied to your back cheeks or something? Get up and pound that pavement boy! When I was your age I was out there every day going door to door like a pretentious salesman spouting my resume at anyone who would take it. Finding a job IS a full time job! So forget yourself and work! Work! Work!”

Yeah yeah, I’ve heard variations on that old speech more times than I care to think about. Guess what? I AM trying! I am trying, and I’m sick of trying at the same time. No, I don’t apply to every single job that comes along in the hopes some compassionate soul will throw me a freekin bone – I already feel desperate enough! But I DO apply for jobs. Many many jobs! I do call and ask for information. I do research. I do put my all into a cover letter and a resume. And both are even pretty good! I have two professional reference letters, and three professional references all of whom would speak highly of me if ever contacted. I might not have the paperwork, but I do have a fair bit of transferable experience. And I am eager and willing to learn. Heck, I don’t even mind working collaboratively on a team! But is that enough? Noooooo! It seems nearly every effort is met either with silence or with “We’ve reviewed your resume, and you are not exactly what we’re looking for at this time. Soooo sorry, but do feel free to keep trying so we can send you the same form letter a few more times.” Although recently I have gotten a few emails and one interview which basically told me that “we really thought you were great, but we have someone who is just that much better. SO sorry, you were number 2, but we needed number 1”.

You want number Two? I’ll give you a friggin number two. And you can take that number two, and you can go suck it. You can suck it until it’s all gone!

I’d be a bloody great worker. The thing about having a disability is I KNOW how hard it is for people like me to get a job. People see someone blind and they wonder, and they scoff. Even if outwardly they are supportive, there’s usually uncertainty. So that’s why I would work all the harder. I know the trust that’s been given to me when I’m hired, and I know I have a lot to prove. And in the last few “jobs” I’ve received, I’ve done my best to make sure I do. And to the best of my knowledge, I have.

This brings me to my second point. People who can’t seem to figure out how to do the jobs they’ve been hired for, and people who piss and moan about how tragically terrible their jobs are. To them I curse a pox on all their household, and for them to be turned to living stone. That’s the kind of petrification where your body is fully transformed, but you remain completely aware of your surroundings, and the passage of time.

If you can’t at least attempt to do a job correctly, quit. Quit and leave the job for someone else who needs it. Now, everyone makes mistakes. We’re not perfect. But I swear, some people simply ARE mistakes. It’s like their spirits are trapped in the wrong body or something because they just can’t figure out the simplest of tasks, or they simply don’t care. I’m not talking about Fred Furball over there at the sales counter who fumbles with words, or with the cash register. I’m talking about those stupid bum darts who probably spent half their lives peeing on the toilet seat until someone told them to lift the lid before they start. These are people who consistently provide inaccurate information, or who have a work ethic and personality at constant odds with the very job they’ve been hired for. Case in point, a counselor without empathy or compassion. Or a doctor without a burning desire to see people healed. Basically, I’m talking about people who when you see them, you just can’t help wondering “how did someone like you end up working here?”

Now, those people who feel the need to constantly ejaculate verbal diarrhea about how terrible their jobs, their bosses and their work lives are …. Ooooh, please let me mentally punch them right in their gaping, flapping mouths! I realize we all have bad days. I myself have been known to complain at times about the stupidity of the work place. I’m talking to YOU, NCO! But the truth is, I was always thankful for my job. If you feel the need to complain about the bad day you’ve had at work every once in a while, great! We need amusing stories about the silliness that goes on at work. But when it’s time to go to work and all you can do is moan and groan like a hippo giving birth? That’s when I have a problem. If you hate your job THAT much, quit! Free the space up for someone who will at least appreciate it. I’m so incredibly sick of this. I swear it makes up a decent portion of the Facebook statuses and bus conversations I come across. You need to nut up and shut up, sit back and thank the good Lord, Allah, Buddha, Krishna, the eternal goddess moonbeams or your beloved Iphone that you even have a job at all!

We’re supposed to be moving soon. It’s been in the works off and on for a few years. It’s frustrating because it’s all up to me. Wherever I can find work, we’ll move. I feel under the weight of constant pressure. I know I’m being over-dramatic, but every time someone asks us when we’re moving, it’s like having a gentle punch in the testicles. You feel a tightening in your bowels, and a slight bout of nausea. It’s not enough to make you sick, but it’s enough to make you more than a little uncomfortable. Just once I want to be the barer of good news during such a conversation. But right now, I’m just feeling drained. After the constant prayers, government sponsored employment programs for people with disabilities and my own initiative, I just wish I could catch a break. Am I asking for too much? Am I not trying hard enough? I honestly just don’t know anymore. All I know for sure is after so many hard-working attempts have led only to rejection, It gets harder to give it your all.

I can see clearly now...

As most of you know my husband is visually impaired. It has brought some very unique challenges to our marriage but it has also brought us closer together as a couple. There have been tears of frustration and definitely laughter. Sometimes I even have forgotten that Remy is visually impaired.

One of the things that I take care of is our grocery shopping, not too unusual. Well one Sunday while I was going to school I was taking a shower and sobbing. That week I was going to school (8 am-4pm Mon-Fri on top of homework, projects, and studying!) was going visiting teaching, had institute, had my calling to deal with, as well as other odds and ends that goes with being an adult. We also had no food in the house.

I was standing in the shower crying thinking about all of this. Remy came in and asked me what was wrong. I sobbed "We're going to ssssttttaaaarrrvvveeee!" Remy listened to me talk about the week I had ahead of me. He suggested we call and ask someone for a ride (would cut down 2 hours of travel time) but I didn't even have time to do the actual shopping.  I told him I'd be out in a few minutes but really I just sat down in the shower and cried.

A few minutes later Remy came in to tell me that he called our friend Andrea and they were going to take care of the shopping if I made the list. I felt instant relief and gratitude. What a blessing!

Although we face challenges that some couples never even think of I wouldn't change him for the world.