CHAPTER 183 RESHAPING THE BAN…ER…COMPANY 2000 - 2001
Over in Branding, the Marketing Research group had also been decimated in a sense. Barry Strepko was still the Section Manager, but there didn’t seem to be any direction for him. Larry Taylor had become The Boss’ assistant and wasn’t replaced on the floor. Tina on paper reported to Barry, but in reality was taking orders directly from Joan Sullivan, who was Barry’s boss now. Then in April Nathan Hardy (pictured left with Rick Kazmarcyk to his right.) quit.
In the summer, Sherry and I had worked identifying most of the problems with AnalytiX. We had drawn up a plan to fix the darn thing as much as possible to the existing data systems and designed a presentation to the bank to show what it could do. We had the area under control for the first time. I was doing the builds and some other tech work that Rick had done. Sherry was doing most of the tech stuff, though. I was handling the Analyses and the Direct Mail, since the Direct Mail Clerk was proving problematic
Recourses, as only they could, wrote the ad to sound like something completely different and we were getting the wrong type of applicants. They also wanted more money than Sherry and I made together. We finally took matters in hand, and wrote the ad ourselves and then we got some better responses. One was a woman named Melissa. We read her application and felt she would be better suited to fill Nathan Hardy’s position, which was still unfilled. So we sent her resume over to Barry.
Finally we hired a young man as Direct Mail Clerk by the name of Jim Cameron. Not the movie director. (I wondered if he could have been related to the Joe Cameron who had initially interviewed me at Wilmington Trust in 1980.) Jim had been working on Profitability in Accounting when I was there. I always thought he was a bit immature, but I thought he could do this job and I said let’s take him. I was tired of doing Direct Mail myself. It wasn’t really part of my Job.
They offered Jim Cameron the job. They offered $30,000 a year. He asked for $35,000. They gave it to him. It was now November 2000. We had been looking since June when Jennifer had quit. We knew Jim had to give two weeks notice in Accounting, but no, Accounting said, it had to be closer to three. WTC’s payroll system could not make a change in the middle of a pay period. He had to start on a Monday at the start of a pay period. ISN”T THAT DUMB!
know he started just before Thanksgiving. I took the day after Thanksgiving off. When I returned, no Jim. He was off a couple days, came back in, left early, came in and started crying, left early and then disappeared. What the?
Oh, poor Jim. His girlfriend, his fiancée, had broken off with him and he was in such a depression he couldn’t work. He didn’t show up again until nearly February 2001. When he came back to work, he still took a lot of time off because he would begin crying. He also couldn’t seem to get the hang of AnalytiX and he also kept missing his deadlines in Direct mail. He forgot to notify people of task dates and mailings and little things like that. In summer 2001, almost a half year since he started, Mary Murphy wrote him up, which is always an initial step toward dismissal if your performance doesn’t improve, which his showed no signs of doing.
Meanwhile, in early 2001, who shows up on our doorstep, but Jim Wadsworth. He has been moved into Interactive Services and assigned to report to Michele Wilson, right, a Section manager over the online development. Michele is nuts. She should never have become a manager, except she is a friend of The Boss. However, she did go on to become a vice President at Provident Bank, so maybe she was nuts after all.
Jim was given the task of counting hits to the website. I though this didn’t sound like a job for his level. Jim had been a Section Manager, a Level 20 and with the bank a lot longer than I had been. He had a Master’s Degree in Marketing from the University of Delaware, for gosh sake.
yearly evaluation under Mary Murphy in August 2000 and it was a very good one. I had started getting little awards here and there. A $50 Star Bucks Aware, some kind of reward Starbucks gave out through our strong points program. I hated their overpriced, burnt -tasting coffee, so I never used the award. I had 30,000 Strong Points, for ideas I submitted.. Best of all, Sherry and I actually had AnalytiX being productive.
I had many sleepless nights in early 2000, especially with the terminations of Harry and Joyce in February 2000. I was expecting to be a marked man, too. But a year later, by the spring of 2001, I was still there and feeling secure with the thought I would be at WTC until I decided to retire. I talked about retiring when I reached 62 if things still felt too tense, but I figured by 2001 I was going to make it to 65.
In August 2001, I should have received another yearly raise . I heard nothing. Well, it wasn’t unusual for raises to be late in the Marketing area. Then I got a call from one of the women who assisted Mary asking when my anniversary date was. She said she wanted to know when I had first came to Interactive Services. “December 1999,”
I told her. Ah ha, these sneaky people are planning to change the time you got your raise and save themselves six months of salary increase. See, if I were getting a raise, it should be effective in September on my yearly anniversary of starting at the bank. But it sounded as if they were going to change the procedure. I didn’t think any more of it, except it was another cheap trick.
claimed we were not a Wealth Management Business going after the rich with upscale money (although we were). We weren’t to use the word Bank anymore either. We were to use Company. And we didn’t have Customers anymore. Now we had Clients.
All the energy was going into renovating our offices, paining them black and gray, everything to appeal to the upper classes, so colorless they must be the most boring people in the world.
AnalytiX was going to be a basic building block to a Cust…oops, I mean, Client Relationship Management System. Well, if AnalytiX was going to be in the thick of things, then I guess I would be around. Somebody has to run it, Which was now only Sherry and I. Yes, Jim Cameron was actually back in the office, but that didn’t mean he was doing top-flight work, if any. He was yet to get over his tears. He had a blanket ticket to take off whenever the tear drops fell under the Disability Act. Sherry and I did most of what had to be done.
I turned sixty in June. My family threw an over-the-hill party for
me.I went on vacation in mid-August.
Jim Wadsworth happened to go on vacation the same week as I. Our first day back from vacation, we happened to meet walking into the office. He was upbeat. He had just turned 55. He asked if I might be able to help him with a database that he used to handle data from the Analytix website. I said I would.
On the Wednesday of that week, Jim disappeared. He was called to the execution chamber on the first floor and told to leave immediately and not return; do not pass GO and collect $200 on the way out. Security brought him in on the weekend to collect his personal belongings, escorting him in and out.
What a shock. Jim had been with the ban…uh, company, 27 years. An even bigger shock was when I found they had terminated him for “failure to perform his duties satisfactorily”. Oh, yeah, 27 years in marketing and suddenly he isn’t performing. Right!
September came. My anniversary passed on September 3, 21 years at Wilmington Trust and still no raise. Then on Wednesday, September 5, at around 10:00 in the morning, Fil Sherry stopped by my cubicle.
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