The Human Condition

century building, its architectural beauty had been destroyed by the array of perspex signs which hung above and around its solid wooden doors, the gaudy advertising hoardings plastered across the inside of its large, arched windows, and the ATM which had been crow-barred into what had once been a street-level window. Ignoring the unwanted attention of yet another rancid, dribbling corpse which hurled itself at him, he paused to check the screen of the ATM. Bloody thing was down again. No doubt he'd get the blame. Nothing short of 99.85% uptime was good enough for the bank. Another target missed, and he hadn't even made it through the front door yet.

    The staff door at the side of the building was already open. That was completely against the company's security policy. Which idiot had left it open? Didn't they know there was a strict security procedure to be followed each morning before anyone could go inside? Angrily he stormed into the building and slammed and bolted the door shut behind him. He'd let himself out last thing on Friday evening and he'd assumed that one of the others would have locked the doors after him. Christ, could the bank have been left open all weekend?

    By quarter past nine only three other members of staff had arrived for work. The branch manager (Brian Statham, ten years Walters' junior) had already been in his office when Walters had arrived, pacing about furiously, slamming into the door and occasionally banging against the glass. Two of the other clerks � Janice Phelps and Tom Compton � were dead at their desks. Janice was slumped over her computer terminal whilst Compton had fallen off his chair and lay spread-eagled on the carpet. Walters was appalled by the lack of work being done around him. He knocked on Statham's door to try and get something done about it but his manager seemed unconcerned and was only marginally more responsive than the others. He took it upon himself to try and improve the situation. There was no way they could run the branch on a skeleton staff like this, was there? He dug out the telephone numbers of some of the missing staff from their personnel files and tried to call them to find out where they were and what was happening. He cursed when he couldn't get the telephones to work. The damn lines were still down.

    He just had to get on with it, Walters decided. It was half-past nine, time to open the branch to the public, and it was all down to him again as usual. He disappeared back into the manager's office and took the front door key from his desk drawer. He then walked the length of the banking hall, unlocked the heavy wooden doors and pulled them open.

    Nothing happened. A few random figures in the street stopped and turned around to see what the noise was but, other than that, nothing happened. Walters sadly remembered a time when the banking hall would have been filled with an endless queue of customers all day every Monday, and the queue would have been out the door first thing. How things had changed.

    He dejectedly wandered back and took up his position behind his till.

    Walters didn't mind hard work. He could cope with an in-tray piled high with papers and a huge queue of customers at the counter. None of that bothered him just as long as everyone was pulling his or her weight. He'd happily work until midnight if everyone else worked that late too. But today that wasn't happening. He was already annoyed by the fact that less than half of the staff of the branch had turned up for work today. What was really winding him up, however, was the fact that he was the only one who seemed to be doing anything.

    It was almost midday. The bank had been slowly filling with customers for the last half-hour. After waiting until almost eleven o'clock before the first customer of the day had appeared, a ragged bunch of them had now dragged themselves up the concrete wheelchair access ramp and through the doors. Unsavoury looking types, they hadn't actually seemed to want anything, they'd just wandered up and down on the other side of the glass panel which separated the back-office from the public area. Walters had shouted at them and tried to get them to come to his till. They'd crowded round when they heard his voice, but he still didn't know what it was they actually wanted.

    Behind the counter absolutely nothing was happening. Walters glanced back over his shoulder occasionally and shook his head in despair. Lazy bastards, he thought to himself, you