He was $4.71 over. Somehow the bank had taken in $4.71 more than the total of the deposit slips.
On his way out (he had purposely invented some late work for himself) Deeks stopped by the table back of the cages, where John Berry was staring unhappily at piles of deposit slips.
“Trouble?” he asked Berry. “Four-seventy-one over,” Berry said.
“Hmm,” Deeks commented. “That’s bad.”
“Not good,” Berry said. “Can’t figure it.”
“Better check those slips again,” Deeks said.
“I’ve half a mind to take four-seventy-one from the till and let it go at that,” Berry grumbled.
“The Valley,” Deeks said righteously, “doesn’t do things like that.”
“Well,” Berry asked sullenly, “just what would you do?”
“I’d check,” Deeks told him, “and then I’d recheck.”
“Um-hm.”
“If you look long enough and hard enough you can always find an error in arithmetic,” Deeks said. “If I’ve learned anything in my twenty-three years here, that’s it.”
That evening Deeks bought himself a steak dinner. He waited two weeks before he made another small gift to the bank, and this time he raised himself from $4.71 to $6.38, and Berry kept all four tellers after hours.
Six days later he went up to $11.60 and Berry felt obliged to report the discrepancy to Mr. Rolfe, the cashier. Mr. Rolfe spent all the next day examining the methods and procedures followed by the tellers in taking in and accounting for the money that passed over their counters.
That afternoon Deeks left early and for the first time in his life had a suit made to order.
For four months Deeks continued his assault on the Bank. At the end of that time there were circles under Berry’s eyes, a teller had been transferred to the Bank’s branch in Fairview, Mr. Rolfe was spending almost all his time watching the cages, and the Bank had ordered a special audit by an outside accounting firm.
Deeks estimated that this special audit would cost the Bank between three and four hundred dollars. That afternoon he ordered a table-model television set sent to his sister in California.
Soon after the audit was completed a stranger came to the Bank and was introduced to the staff as Mr. Bricklow. The staff was instructed to cooperate fully with Mr. Bricklow, and it quickly got around that Mr. Bricklow was a representative of Hermann, Struckle, and Foist, a well-known firm of management engineers.
Cautious investigation revealed that Mr. Rolfe, the cashier, had one day gone to the office of Mr. Elliott, the first vice-president, and solemnly announced that something was drastically wrong with the efficiency standards of the Bank — at the so-called working level only, of course — and that he was damned if he knew where the trouble was. Mr. Rolfe had taken this news to Mr. Edward T. P. Fannington, PRESIDENT, and Mr. Fannington, who had got where he was because he made decisions on his own and acted on them without shilly-shallying, had called Hermann, Struckle, and Foist.
Hermann, Struckle, and Foist had listened to the problem and announced that the immediate difficulty was “more symptomatic than self-contained.” They had recommended a thorough management and operational survey, which their firm was prepared to make for the sum of $12,000. When Jebal Deeks heard this figure he moved out of the rooming house in which he had lived for nearly twenty years and rented a modern three-room apartment on fashionable Elmhurst Street. And he had the inspiration to broaden and enrich his scheme with entirely new tactics.
Deeks was assigned to Mr. Bricklow as the Bank’s man, the inside man who knew more about the “working level” than anyone else, and for three months he labored with a new diligence to accommodate Mr. Bricklow and the two “engineers” who were soon brought in to “get to the bottom of this thing.”
The strange discrepancies continued, however, and Deeks saw to it that the discrepancies were not limited to simple overages in the tellers’ daily accounts.
Mr. Bricklow one day pointed out to Deeks that the filing cabinet labeled Small loans: 1936–1938 actually contained mortgage papers for 1932–1934.
“How did you people get yourselves into this mess?” Mr. Bricklow asked, appalled.
“I suppose we were just getting a little smug and rusty,” Deeks said, and he suggested that he would search the files himself for errors.
Mr. Bricklow accepted the suggestion, and Deeks went to work. He found quite a few things wrong with the filing system.
Then one of Mr. Bricklow’s assistants discovered that, through a clerical error which no one seemed able to trace, one of the guards had received one weekly pay check equal to that received by the PRESIDENT and had quietly cashed the check. The guard was discharged, of course, but the incident went into Mr. Bricklow’s notebook, where it was sidemarked, with a notation N.B.! in the margin.
One day, while Hermann, Struckle, and Foist’s engineers were busy in the back room, Mr. Fannington, PRESIDENT, received a telephone call from his old friend, Mr. Blackstone, president of the Blackstone Manufacturing Company, the city’s second biggest industrial concern.
Mr. Blackstone kidded Mr. Fannington without mercy, playing fifteen variations on a single joke. The joke was that the Blackstone Manufacturing Company had received a monthly account statement, properly addressed to Blackstone by the Bank, which contained the balance sheet of a private individual named Kackel. Kackel had written eleven checks that month, six of them to his local liquor store.
Mr. Blackstone was uproariously jocular, and told Mr. Fannington that he wasn’t mad about it, just wondering if Kackel, when he opened the statement that came to him, had rushed out and written another great big check to his liquor store. After Mr. Fannington hung up he went directly to Mr. Bricklow and asked him when the hell he was going to finish his survey; if he didn’t finish soon the whole damn Bank might collapse in a rubble heap at their feet.
Deeks had never heard Mr. Fannington swear. It was a juicy plum to add to the sweet fruits of his efforts.
Three months after Mr. Bricklow had completed his field work the report arrived, beautifully bound in black leather, with gold letters stamped on the cover. The letters announced a Management Survey Conducted by Hermann, Struckle, and Foist in Behalf of the Valley National Bank. They also announced, in the largest letters of all, that the report was CONFIDENTIAL.
While the report was being written to its full 316 pages, complete with charts, graphs, and tables, matters worsened at the Bank, and when the book arrived Mr. Fannington read it through in one evening. He then sent his copy to Colonel Sykes, adding a note: “This is rough stuff, but we might as well face the facts.”
A special meeting of the board of directors was called for the following Tuesday. Hermann, Struckle, and Foist hadn’t minced any words.
The Valley National Bank, they wrote, was operating on archaic management principles. Fortunately, the fundamental problems had been faced in time, and so far the trouble was only “symptomatic” — a word they used nearly a hundred times in the report. However, if the Bank wished to avoid graver consequences, many, many changes would be required.
Among the changes were:
1. A re-facing of the exterior of the Bank building and a complete renovation of the interior. Twenty pages of reasons followed this recommendation.
2. The elimination of the post now held by the third vice-president.
3. The replacement of the individual now occupying the post of first vice-president. (This suggestion was why the report was considered sufficiently confidential to be kept from Mr. Elliott, the first vice-president.)