Face the Money
Written by Russ on April 3, 2008 – 2:01 pmI worked at a Burger King in high school for 2.5 years. It wasn’t a terrible experience (for me)–I came out of my nerd shell quite a bit and learned a lot about a world outside of my front door that I probably would not have otherwise experienced.
The lesson I learned that I keep with me to this day came from one of my least favorite bosses–a woman by the name of Sandy. I’m sure Sandy didn’t really give a crap about a bunch of high school kids who were more interested in flirting and planning parties than in keeping her restaurant clean and all that, but one time when she caught me hanging out in the drive-thru trying to hide from her view, she fired-open my cash register and took a look.
I’m pretty sure that gave me a good scare–it seemed like there was always someone taking money from the tills and subsequently getting fired. That person was never me; my parents would have killed me–regardless of anything a police officer or cell mate could have done, that thought was one that terrorized me. Plus, I made minimum wage, drove a ‘76 White Chevy Impala and gas was a helluva lot cheaper than it is today. I had it all.
Sandy looked at me with a bit of a disgusted look and told me to “Face your money”.
“Huh?”
She told me I should face the money–even if this wasn’t a career for me, I should be taking some pride in my work and I should make sure that all the money was facing the same way. Not only would it make the job of counting my till a lot easier for me (and her, of course), but it would make the customers feel less concerned about a pimply kid handling their cash when it came back neat and orderly.
“Okay.”
Simple enough, really. But Every. Single. Day. I think of this. NO ONE faces the damned money today. Unless there are a bunch of fresh, crisp bills from a bank, you very rarely get your money back facing the same way. Cab drivers may be the exception to this, for what it’s worth.
I’m sure this is one of those “oh whatever” types of things, but wait until the next time you grab a coffee or a lunch when you’re not using a debit or credit card.
Every time I pay cash, I find myself being the slow poke in front of the line trying to straighten out the bills so that they sit right in my wallet–the more valuable in the back, all the way up to the singles.
Blind people take their money and apply folding patterns–think of what this means to them. Think of how this little batch of organization of money helps you out in so much of your daily life. Think about how little effort it truly requires for that cashier to keep their money “faced” so you don’t have to slow down the line, risk dropping your wallet/purse/fanny pak, whatever it is.
My point today is simple: Identify simple tasks in your life that you’re over-looking and find ways to make them work outside of your sphere of reference. I’m not a cashier anymore, but every time I have to face the money, I think about Sandy and her lesson, and where I am today.
Sure, Sandy didn’t make me the stunningly mediocre UX Practitioner you read about today, but she did teach me that you don’t have be overtly anal-retentive to be organized and to have a downstream impact.
Start small. The big stuff will follow.
Posted in Usability, User Experience |
May 13th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Love the insights and the connections. Now as then, there is yet so much to learn, grasshopper. Things may have changed from a ’security’ perspective (e.g. keeping the transactions as short as possible and closing the cash drawer quickly), but even having ‘posed’ as a grocery cashier in the past 5 years, we regularly ‘faced’ our cash (never heard the term until now).
The sad part was, for some of us, that act alone was a small thing that made the job meaningful — it was the one thing we could control. The other was helping customers, which wasn’t all that often because we weren’t given maps/directories of product/shelf location and the most frequently asked questions we got were typically around product placement. [All part of the data gathering I was doing about the grocery experience.]
I learned a ‘lot’ and the darned job cost me a lot too. Paid $6/hr. because of the ergonomics of the counters and my height (avg female 5′4″) I messed up my shoulder/elbow dragging cases of beer over the scanner. Because I didn’t make the connection of the injury to the job until after I’d quit, it wasn’t covered (wouldn’t have been once I quit anyway — they were self-insured, and that was the terms of their agreement). Women with 20 years at the company were kept under 40 hours so that they were never given benefits. But they could have chosen to leave and didn’t.