Cashiers at the bank must now stand all day. What if they have a tummy ache?

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/01/cashiers-bank-stand-all-day-natwest

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It’s happened. There are no more cashiers in my local NatWest bank. They’re all gone. I go in and there’s a strange, blank, half-painted wall where they used to be. A small cluster of dazed customers are standing about, not knowing quite what to do. Neither do I, so I shout at the wall: “Where are the cashiers?”

A young man appears. “I’m the cashier,” says he pleasantly.

“No, you are not. Where’s your desk-sitting-down-place-thingy?” I have lost my temper and vocabulary, Mellor/Mitchell style. “This is an effing disgrace, I am not using those effing machines blah blah ...”

But what a charming young man. I cannot fault him. Even faced with a bellowing, agitated and offensive woman, he is polite, personable, patient and relentlessly upbeat. “Here it is,” he says, pointing to a stand-up-level desk attached to a big black sticking-up lump. There is no seat.

I am outraged. “You can’t sit down,” I say. “You must stand up all day. What if you’ve got a tummy ache?”

“We can take a break and sit down,’ he replies perkily. But that’s not good enough. In the bad old days, workers in grand department stores were never allowed to sit down, and now their poor legs are bursting with varicose veins.

At the other stand-up cashier post a customer is handing another young employee a six-inch wad of bank notes. In the open. I point at it. “Look. Any robber could come in and snatch the money. You have no protection.’ But can I get him to express the weeniest hint of discontent? No.

“If you think this is bad,” says Fielding, “you should try an American bank. It’s flinty-faced ‘where’s your sack load of ID, before we give you a cent’ over there. At least our standing non-cashiers say ‘Can I help you?’”

So they do. Mine does everything I ask at his ridiculous, open-plan, stand-up post. Pleasant to the very end, all through my ranting critique on my own and his behalf. “I want to keep my job,” he says at last. There you have it. He deserves a much better one.