An exaggeration of a bad day

Today was the worst day so far in my working life.

Last week I did what I always do on the 10th of every month. I process the staff claims.

So I did the usual, list all the names, put in their bank account numbers, put in the amounts that they claimed for, upload the list into an online banking site, ask for approval from the directors, and the payments are released.

So it went smoothly and without problem. Or so I thought.

By the end of the week, I keep receiving calls from this former employee whose claim was included in the batch that I just processed.

She kept telling me that the amount that she gets is far less from what she submitted.

This does happen, but not that frequent. Sometimes they mistook their claim figure with another figure in their bank accounts, and sometimes they didn't go check at all.

So I didn't panic and I told her maybe there was a delay from the bank.

On Friday evening, as I was driving back home, another staff called, and informed me of the same issue.

By this time, I was all frantic and I texted my colleague who was still at the office, I thought of asking for her help to check the list that I made.

And to make things worse, she replied my text saying that SHE didn't get her claim AT ALL.

Yeay, happy weekend for me.

So, this morning, I found out that the bank account numbers of 18 people in the list got mixed up!

They ended up getting somebody else's claims instead of their own!

YYYYYYYYIIIIIIIIIIKKKKKKKKKKKKEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!

I panicked, felt like vomiting, crying, wailing, hiding because I was so very ashamed and all those worse feelings that you can ever imagine.

But what puzzled me the most was how can the bank proceed with the payment when it was undoubtedly obvious that the name of the beneficiary and their bank account numbers were not tally??

What the hell, Royal Bank of Scotland!? If you rejected all 18 payments, at least it would be easier because I could've just paid the people the exact amount they claimed for.

But noooooooooo, you just blindly pay them when it was so freakin' obvious that the bank account numbers didn't belong to the right people!

And then I had to spend like an hour figuring out who has been short paid and who received more money than they should!

So I asked my boss what I should do.

She's very kind and she helped me to sort this mess out.

But one thing that's driving me crazy is that when she gives instruction on what to do, the volume of her voice was 100% megaphone-loud.

Hey, I'm embarrassed enough about this even without you yelling instructions at me, or rather announcing to the whole office that I've made a huge mistake.

Thanks boss ;)

And then this technician came up to me and said, "Farah, takde salah masuk claim dalam bank account saye ke?"

What the actual f***?

He didn't even have claim in this batch, how the freakin' hell did he know? Maybe it was the announcement my boss made or maybe someone spread this issue all throughout the office.

Good news spread like wild fire in that office, and by good news I mean people's mistakes and by wildfire I mean in the speed of light.

So the conclusion is, I am ashamed and I've never felt this pathetic before. The end :)

Might I add a little bit here, I want to express my gratitude to the Superman who listened to me when I was crying like an over-sized baby over the phone and came to the rescue during lunch hour. Thank you! You made me feel a whole lot better about myself!