Loan Walking

I have recently been given an added responsibility at the pawn shop, and it is quite the doozy.

I am now responsible for what we call "Loan Walking", a single process that includes many steps. For purposes of the blog, I will only supply you with the general duties of loan walking and not all of the little monkey wrenches that get thrown into the mix to make things more complicated than they should be.

Thus, my loan walking duty includes the following steps:
1) Making sure all the loans have been packaged and stored correctly
2) Making sure the loan descriptions are complete
3) Taking down notes about errors that were either made in the loan description or how the loan was stored
4) Figuring out who made the mistakes and then writing them a note describing the error and how to fix them
5) Checking up on previous mistakes to make sure they have been corrected.

Depending on how many loans there were from the previous day (generally around sixty) and how many mistakes were made, this requires anywhere from two to three hours of my time. It's a tedious job, but I really enjoy it. It allows me to hide out in the back and not directly interact with customers, which is often a blessing. There are many customers who are nice and interesting--I've met tattoo artists, rehabilitation counselors, prison guards, Build-A-Bear employees, people working in the medical field, and lots of average Joe types--but there are a lot of people who are loud, rude, and just plain stupid. But those are stories for a later time.

Back to loan walking--One of the more unfortunate duties is making sure everyone is correcting the mistakes they've made. Each day, I write out the mistakes each employee made on their own pieces of paper. I then put these papers into each employee's file. In turn, each pawn broker is supposed to check their file every day and then correct the errors I describe, but there are some of them who habitually make the same errors--almost as if on purpose or with no regard for the rules--and some who don't even check their files at all. The bad thing about this is that these rebellious types tend to be the pawn managers.

I asked my manager what to do about the pawn managers not correcting their mistakes and was told I was supposed to bring it up to them as a reminder. Okay. I can do that. But I don't want to. They've been working at the pawn shop a lot longer than I have and they know what is expected of them. I feel weird approaching them to remind them to fulfill their duties. But remind I must.

Regardless of the awkward leadership dynamics, I enjoy joking about the power I now wield. Essentially, I get to tell people what they're doing wrong, tell them how to fix it, and then make sure they fix their mistakes. I've cracked jokes about making up new "legislations" that would require the pawn brokers to do strange things like yodeling or smacking their own butts or curtsying when they put loans on certain shelves. Of course, I have no such power. I am just a minion, but I like to pretend. It gives me something to chuckle about to myself when I'm in the back amongst all of those loans. It does, after all, get rather loanly. (I hope you get the pun. I told it to one of my fellow employees and he didn't. I felt rather stupid.)