Employer Policy

Work Working in Taiwan
1

Is this right? Am I missing something?

The other day I sent a wire from my bank. The girl at the counter filled the form out incorrectly - said she would send it exactly like the one we sent last month. But she didn’t send it exactly the same - she left out important information. I even handed her a sheet with complete instructions, but I don’t think she scrutinized it well, because it was in English, and she was filled with misplaced confidence. So a week later we had to send ‘ammending information’ in order that the funds were properly credited.

So after we sent the amendment, the teller calls me 1 day later with the following: ‘The receiving bank is charging us AUD40 for processing the amendment. Please accept this charge, because otherwise my employer (one of Taiwan’s largest banks) will debit my wages for the amount.’ I’ve gotten this line on a couple of other occasions, and my response has always been that I’m not going to bear the responsibility because XYZ employer treats its employees like dogs.

I just think it is beyond comment that an employer would direct its employees, on a personal basis, to go begging from customers. Is this real policy in Taiwan? Do employers really treat their employees so poorly? Not to mention customers. Or is it a racket?

I’m inclined to switch banks, just to avoid working with the personnel at this bank again, but I’m concerned that in fact all banks/businesses in Taiwan are equally screwed up.

Tell me it ain’t so!

2

It’s possible. You should also consider that AUS$40 is probably more than half a day’s wages for the poor girl… :frowning:

3

I’m pretty sure bank employees have to pay for clerical errors out of their pockets. Recently I deposited about NT$60K into a bank account, but I had the bills in several different stacks and somehow I only gave her NT$40K. She credited my account for NT$60K. I realized the mistake later in the afternoon when I realized that I had still had NT$20K in my shirt pocket.

The next day I came into correct the error. When she realized that I was making good the NT$20K she had been short the previous day, she burst into tears. Her superior explained to me that she would have had to pay it out of her pocket. Her monthly salary is NT$24K because she is a recent college grad.

The bank–Taiwan Coop–gave me a very nice stainless steel set of pocket tools as a token of appreciation. I really like this bank. It’s very old fashioned but they have great service and branches in every podunk town in Taiwan.

On a side note, I’ve noticed that people in their 20s make far more mistakes counting change etc. than used to be the case in the old days. Be careful.

4

[quote=“Feiren”]I’m pretty sure bank employees have to pay for clerical errors out of their pockets. Recently I deposited about NT$60K into a bank account, but I had the bills in several different stacks and somehow I only gave her NT$40K. She credited my account for NT$60K. I realized the mistake later in the afternoon when I realized that I had still had NT$20K in my shirt pocket.

The next day I came into correct the error. When she realized that I was making good the NT$20K she had been short the previous day, she burst into tears. Her superior explained to me that she would have had to pay it out of her pocket. Her monthly salary is NT$24K because she is a recent college grad.

The bank–Taiwan Coop–gave me a very nice stainless steel set of pocket tools as a token of appreciation. I really like this bank. It’s very old fashioned but they have great service and branches in every podunk town in Taiwan.

On a side note, I’ve noticed that people in their 20s make far more mistakes counting change etc. than used to be the case in the old days. Be careful.[/quote]

It’s heinous, and completely true.
But I want to know how you could have 20K in your shirt pocket and not notice???
Was it in them new-fangled NT$10K bills I keep hearing about??

5

I needed to keep some cash so I was planning to have $$$ in my shirt pocket when walking out of the bank. Just not that much.

6

Noted. I’ll be giving YOU a big hug with extras next time we meet. Just in case. 20k buys a goodly amount of libation.

7

Noted. I’ll be giving YOU a big hug with extras next time we meet. Just in case. 20k buys a goodly amount of libation.[/quote]

Yeah, just for future reference, no, Snadman isn’t trying to feel you up…

8

[quote=“Feiren”]I’m pretty sure bank employees have to pay for clerical errors out of their pockets. Recently I deposited about NT$60K into a bank account, but I had the bills in several different stacks and somehow I only gave her NT$40K. She credited my account for NT$60K. I realized the mistake later in the afternoon when I realized that I had still had NT$20K in my shirt pocket.

The next day I came into correct the error. When she realized that I was making good the NT$20K she had been short the previous day, she burst into tears. Her superior explained to me that she would have had to pay it out of her pocket. Her monthly salary is NT$24K because she is a recent college grad.

The bank–Taiwan Coop–gave me a very nice stainless steel set of pocket tools as a token of appreciation. I really like this bank. It’s very old fashioned but they have great service and branches in every podunk town in Taiwan.

On a side note, I’ve noticed that people in their 20s make far more mistakes counting change etc. than used to be the case in the old days. Be careful.[/quote]

Well, if you hadn’t come back to pay it, then the bank would have had to do one of three things:

  1. Suck up the loss. Why should it do that when it was the employee’s fault? If word got out about this, you’d be sure that there’d be a few people trying to run this scam and pocket a quick $20,000. It’s probably to protect against fraud as much as anything else.

  2. Call you up and try to get the $20,000 out of you. Yet if they’d given you a receipt showing that you’d deposited the money, how could they prove that you hadn’t? (Okay, maybe they would have video footage, maybe they wouldn’t.)

  3. Make the employee bear the responsibility for her mistake. That sucks, but we’re not talking about her missing a few NT. I would have thought $20,000 would be a large amount of money to overlook.

So, whilst it may suck for the employee, if she really can’t tell the difference between $40,000 and $60,000 she probably shouldn’t be working in a bank. They should have fired her regardless of whether you’d returned the money or not.

9

I can see the anti-pilferage angle, but it doesn’t apply to my example. There is no way she might have pilfered AUD40 - it was a fee charged by the correspondent bank for having filled out the paperwork incompletely. There are hazards to different types of jobs. Under the circumstances, the banks have little to zero incentive to do quality control or better training to root out the cause of errors.

The policy treats employees and customers like sh*t. How lame …

AUD40 is a run-of-the-mill cost of doing business. There should be some threshold amount - say NT$20k - below which the bank generally eats it as a normal cost of doing business.

Chalk another one up for the ‘Why Taiwan sucks’ column.

10

Paniolo: Well, the problem is much deeper. Taiwan’s education system actively discourages people from thinking. Anyone with any verve wouldn’t be working in a bank for twenty something thousand NT per month, so I really doubt if throwing a whole lot of training at an employee would help, especially given the general quality of training I’ve seen.

That said, when people join the bank, I’m sure they’re told that if they fuck up, they bear the consequences (and why shouldn’t they?). If people really don’t think they’re capable of doing the job correctly, or the risk worries them too much, then they shouldn’t accept the job in the first place. There shouldn’t be an “incompetence buffer” built into the bank’s financial operations. I wouldn’t invest in such a company, and who in his right mind would?

I wish they had more of these kind of policies here to scare these fuckwits into using the two brain cells they actually have instead of coasting through a work day as though it’s all too fucking hard for them. Fuck, huge numbers of these clowns supposedly graduated both high school and university, yet I wouldn’t even give them some loose change and ask them to go down the street and buy me an ice cream unless they’d been drilled, tested and re-tested on it at least 17,000 times every week in junior high school.

Last night, I went to see a doctor at a hospital. My number for collecting my medicine was 803. When I got there, the number was 798. As it got closer, I moved closer, such that the woman behind the desk could see that at 802, I was practically about to leap onto the counter. So then she skipped straight to 806. I had this WTF?! moment. This other guy stepped up to get 804 and the lady served him. I did another WTF?! So, my girlfriend asked what was going on. The lady first claimed that I hadn’t been there in time. Then, she claimed that she hadn’t in fact skipped past my number, because, yes, 806 does come after 798, but before 803 and how fucking stupid, rude and just plainly inconvenient for us to point out that maybe they should get a human being who can count, not a fucking squirrel randomly pushing buttons hoping that if she pushes enough random buttons quickly enough a fucking acorn will drop onto her desk and she can go and sell it and open a night market stall selling deep-fried pigs’ scrota. She tried to make us look like we’d fucked up rather than admit she’d made a mistake. If that had been the case, we would have thought it fair enough, instead we went away thinking this was “bring your retarded child to work” day.

While I’m at it, the doctor was a fucking moron too. My other doctor (who had sent me to him for a second opinion) had sent me for an x-ray a couple of months before and gone through a lengthy explanation showing me what was wrong on the x-ray. So then the new guy claimed there was no x-ray, and sent me for a new x-ray. I told him I’d already had an x-ray, but he claimed I hadn’t because it wasn’t on the computer (although there were other, older x-rays on there). Yet he didn’t raise an eyebrow at the possibility that, despite having seen the first doctor several times, that doctor supposedly hadn’t sent me for an x-ray, yet had seen fit to give me steroid injections, prescribe a whole lot of medicine, and send me to the physical therapy department. Nah, of course he hadn’t done an x-ray and of course you wouldn’t think that was odd. Fuck, who are these people, and which planet did they just arrive from?

Chalk another couple up for the “Another Example of Someone Fucking-up and Trying to Save Face by Blatantly Lying about It” column. A classic example of some fucking zombies going through the motions who should have a little more fear in their lives for their job security/pay.

I think I’ve turned a corner. Despite the mock angst, this kind of stuff doesn’t work me up now. I actually look forward to it because you couldn’t make this kind of shit up and it’s providing me with a huge collection of amusing stories.

11

[quote=“Paniolo”]I can see the anti-pilferage angle, but it doesn’t apply to my example. There is no way she might have pilfered AUD40 - it was a fee charged by the correspondent bank for having filled out the paperwork incompletely. There are hazards to different types of jobs. Under the circumstances, the banks have little to zero incentive to do quality control or better training to root out the cause of errors.

The policy treats employees and customers like sh*t. How lame …

AUD40 is a run-of-the-mill cost of doing business. There should be some threshold amount - say NT$20k - below which the bank generally eats it as a normal cost of doing business.

Chalk another one up for the ‘Why Taiwan sucks’ column.[/quote]

At least in Illinois, bank tellers are bonded and have to make up anything they are short on at the end of the day.

12

It turns out the better half was a teller at a mid-sized Western US bank. Apparently the policy there was to consider drawer discrepancies below $5 immaterial. Other discrepancies were noted, tracked, followed-up, but under no conditions were honest mistakes deducted from employee wages. Worst case, the employee was fired for repeated or egregious till discrepancies.

But if anyone has done any banking in Singapore, tellers there are clearly on the hook for errors. It is quite apparent once one realizes how anal bank employees in Singapore can be. Singapore banks will not accept any checks with corrections of any kind on them. Also checks with any tears or odd marks are routinely rejected. Chinese … :unamused:

13

[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]Paniolo: Well, the problem is much deeper. Taiwan’s education system actively discourages people from thinking. Anyone with any verve wouldn’t be working in a bank for twenty something thousand NT per month, so I really doubt if throwing a whole lot of training at an employee would help, especially given the general quality of training I’ve seen.

That said, when people join the bank, I’m sure they’re told that if they fuck up, they bear the consequences (and why shouldn’t they?). If people really don’t think they’re capable of doing the job correctly, or the risk worries them too much, then they shouldn’t accept the job in the first place. There shouldn’t be an “incompetence buffer” built into the bank’s financial operations. I wouldn’t invest in such a company, and who in his right mind would?

I wish they had more of these kind of policies here to scare these fuckwits into using the two brain cells they actually have instead of coasting through a work day as though it’s all too fucking hard for them. Fuck, huge numbers of these clowns supposedly graduated both high school and university, yet I wouldn’t even give them some loose change and ask them to go down the street and buy me an ice cream unless they’d been drilled, tested and re-tested on it at least 17,000 times every week in junior high school.

Last night, I went to see a doctor at a hospital. My number for collecting my medicine was 803. When I got there, the number was 798. As it got closer, I moved closer, such that the woman behind the desk could see that at 802, I was practically about to leap onto the counter. So then she skipped straight to 806. I had this WTF?! moment. This other guy stepped up to get 804 and the lady served him. I did another WTF?! So, my girlfriend asked what was going on. The lady first claimed that I hadn’t been there in time. Then, she claimed that she hadn’t in fact skipped past my number, because, yes, 806 does come after 798, but before 803 and how fucking stupid, rude and just plainly inconvenient for us to point out that maybe they should get a human being who can count, not a fucking squirrel randomly pushing buttons hoping that if she pushes enough random buttons quickly enough a fucking acorn will drop onto her desk and she can go and sell it and open a night market stall selling deep-fried pigs’ scrota…[/quote]

Those are good with beer… :homer:

Guy, I’d like to take umbrage with a lot of what you’ve written.
I said I’d like to take umbrage with it.
Unfortunately, well, as vituperative and bitter as it is, it’s pretty much on the mark.
I’ve been working in Taiwan companies for more than 15 years, I guess, humoungous and tiny, useless and blisteringly successful, and I’ve seen shit that would turn you white.
And I’ve never really been able to sort out the chicken-egg relationship of why Taiwanese office workers in general (and this includes engineers and other technical positions) allow their bosses to treat them like fucking garbage.
Did it start with the bosses treating their people crap and them retaliating by becoming essentially useless?
Or did the bosses start out trusting, compassionate, and generous, and the staff responded by taking wild advantage and so the bosses changed to the current totalitarian model?
I’ve a couple ideas, but nothing has ever really seemed to prove one over the other to me.
Mysteries of the East… :bow:

14

I agree that the bank tellers should have to shoulder the burden for dicrepencies, also, I’m an a-hole so would not pay the 40 aussie dollars if it wasnt my mistake just beause its the bank’s policy, why am I out of pocket for the institutions error and employment policy? yes she’s on a shit wage, but thats also the employers decision

[quote=“the chief”] like to take umbrage with it.
Unfortunately, well, as vituperative and bitter as it is, it’s pretty much on the mark.
I’ve been working in Taiwan companies for more than 15 years, I guess, humoungous and tiny, useless and blisteringly successful, and I’ve seen shit that would turn you white.
And I’ve never really been able to sort out the chicken-egg relationship of why Taiwanese office workers in general (and this includes engineers and other technical positions) allow their bosses to treat them like fucking garbage.
Did it start with the bosses treating their people crap and them retaliating by becoming essentially useless?
Or did the bosses start out trusting, compassionate, and generous, and the staff responded by taking wild advantage and so the bosses changed to the current totalitarian model?
I’ve a couple ideas, but nothing has ever really seemed to prove one over the other to me.
Mysteries of the East… :bow:[/quote]

or is maybe its also related to the employer thinking

“If I dont pay you enough to do a good job, then you won’t ever be good enough to get a new job, so I can keep you in this perpetual dead-end job for the next 20 years.”

and the employee thinking

“screw this, I hate my job so much I dont want to do it well on purpose, one day I’ll win the lottery/parents die/marry Lin ChiLin and Ill never set foot through that door again and all jobs must be the same so Ill stick with the shit Ive got for now…”

15

[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]Paniolo: Well, the problem is much deeper. Taiwan’s education system actively discourages people from thinking. Anyone with any verve wouldn’t be working in a bank for twenty something thousand NT per month, so I really doubt if throwing a whole lot of training at an employee would help, especially given the general quality of training I’ve seen.

That said, when people join the bank, I’m sure they’re told that if they fuck up, they bear the consequences (and why shouldn’t they?). If people really don’t think they’re capable of doing the job correctly, or the risk worries them too much, then they shouldn’t accept the job in the first place. There shouldn’t be an “incompetence buffer” built into the bank’s financial operations. I wouldn’t invest in such a company, and who in his right mind would?

I wish they had more of these kind of policies here to scare these fuckwits into using the two brain cells they actually have instead of coasting through a work day as though it’s all too fucking hard for them. Fuck, huge numbers of these clowns supposedly graduated both high school and university, yet I wouldn’t even give them some loose change and ask them to go down the street and buy me an ice cream unless they’d been drilled, tested and re-tested on it at least 17,000 times every week in junior high school.

Last night, I went to see a doctor at a hospital. My number for collecting my medicine was 803. When I got there, the number was 798. As it got closer, I moved closer, such that the woman behind the desk could see that at 802, I was practically about to leap onto the counter. So then she skipped straight to 806. I had this WTF?! moment. This other guy stepped up to get 804 and the lady served him. I did another WTF?! So, my girlfriend asked what was going on. The lady first claimed that I hadn’t been there in time. Then, she claimed that she hadn’t in fact skipped past my number, because, yes, 806 does come after 798, but before 803 and how fucking stupid, rude and just plainly inconvenient for us to point out that maybe they should get a human being who can count, not a fucking squirrel randomly pushing buttons hoping that if she pushes enough random buttons quickly enough a fucking acorn will drop onto her desk and she can go and sell it and open a night market stall selling deep-fried pigs’ scrota. She tried to make us look like we’d fucked up rather than admit she’d made a mistake. If that had been the case, we would have thought it fair enough, instead we went away thinking this was “bring your retarded child to work” day.

While I’m at it, the doctor was a fucking moron too. My other doctor (who had sent me to him for a second opinion) had sent me for an x-ray a couple of months before and gone through a lengthy explanation showing me what was wrong on the x-ray. So then the new guy claimed there was no x-ray, and sent me for a new x-ray. I told him I’d already had an x-ray, but he claimed I hadn’t because it wasn’t on the computer (although there were other, older x-rays on there). Yet he didn’t raise an eyebrow at the possibility that, despite having seen the first doctor several times, that doctor supposedly hadn’t sent me for an x-ray, yet had seen fit to give me steroid injections, prescribe a whole lot of medicine, and send me to the physical therapy department. Nah, of course he hadn’t done an x-ray and of course you wouldn’t think that was odd. Fuck, who are these people, and which planet did they just arrive from?

Chalk another couple up for the “Another Example of Someone Fucking-up and Trying to Save Face by Blatantly Lying about It” column. A classic example of some fucking zombies going through the motions who should have a little more fear in their lives for their job security/pay.

I think I’ve turned a corner. Despite the mock angst, this kind of stuff doesn’t work me up now. I actually look forward to it because you couldn’t make this kind of shit up and it’s providing me with a huge collection of amusing stories.[/quote]

Although your pissed, I prefer to find a rational explanation, and the simplest here seems to be that the woman has no control over thhe computer system, she presses the button and the number pops up, you collect.

Two possible reasons why you were skipped by her

  1. the pharmacist was still counting out your medicine but a different pharmacist counting simpler orders had worked faster than and overtaking the one making up your prescription, since they may be responsible in money for missing medicine, they may have had to phone the Dr to confirm a 10xday or 1xday dosage or the name of a new branded medicament or generic, ie, you prescribed Xantholine and I know you get a 50dollar kickback from the pharma coy for prescribing that, but we ran out so can I give him ethitalene?

  2. The pharmacists work in 2 groups with the first working on one counter operator and the second working with the other counter operator, therefore these groups respectively hand the prepared prescriptions to “their” counter person and your counter person was the other lady

The woman’s general ambivalence and explanation of “806 is after 803” would then be plausable in both, she just couldnt be arsed to explain that to you as you are the 50th person that day to get pissed, but then just walk away. Further, had she explaind it, she would have burned 3 minutes and make her slower and been labelled inefficient.

16

[quote=“itakitez”]or is maybe its also related to the employer thinking

“If I don’t pay you enough to do a good job, then you won’t ever be good enough to get a new job, so I can keep you in this perpetual dead-end job for the next 20 years.”

and the employee thinking

“screw this, I hate my job so much I don’t want to do it well on purpose, one day I’ll win the lottery/parents die/marry Lin Jilin and Ill never set foot through that door again and all jobs must be the same so Ill stick with the shit Ive got for now…”[/quote]

I think you’re close on both.
Certainly, one of the first amazing things that I saw when I was first working in a local office, me coming from a pretty solid blue-collar heavily-unionized background, was how blatantly executive privilege was flaunted in the office where creature comforts were concerned, I swear it was like 1961 at the McMann & Tate agency (look it up). Managers were running around like they were the little dude from Monopoly.
The second amazing thing for me was how everyone just accepted it.
The third amazing thing was the realization that every single one of them was just waiting for their chance to lord every iota of benefit over their (current) co-workers, to get some payback for how they themselves had been demeaned over the years.
And that that was the natural order of things.
This was my introduction to the immovable social/corporate caste system that pretty much persists to this day.
I think it’s borne of the (relatively recent) feudal experience.

17

That’s how is often works in pharmacies in hospitals, they do it in blocks, and everyone in the block rushes to put their piece of paper on the counter first.

18

Amusing? No, amusing stories generally involve indecent amounts of booze and carnal relations of a bizarre nature, not waiting at a counter. No, these experiences provide you with a sense of superiority to compensate for the self-loathing that comes from being a convict and a lowly ESL teacher in Taiwan.

The woman at the counter was probably right. They have two number streams; odd numbers and even numbers. The two streams are independent of each other. Thus 806 could come before 803. There should have been a sign above the counter explaining this.

19

[quote=“Feiren”]
On a side note, I’ve noticed that people in their 20s make far more mistakes counting change etc. than used to be the case in the old days. Be careful.[/quote]

Last week I bought something at 3C total was 292$ I gave the girl 302$ so that I could get a 10 dollar coin back and lighten by pockets of all the change. So looks at the money and says through he mouthful of noodle with out even bothering to look up at me, “that is too much”
I am standing there looking at her thinking… they hire retards at 3C now? how commendable! I tell her yes I know it is too much I gave you 302$ so you can give me 10$ back and not a bunch of coins.

Now she actually looks up from stuffing here face and the latest issue of fashion whore magazine to look confused and say impossible ! it is 292$ if you give me $302 I have to give you $12 dollars in coins. I stood there looking at here for a few seconds wondering how in the fuck she managed to get a job doing customer service and handling money and then i remembered This is Taiwan!~

20

Back in the day, people handling money in Taiwan were incredibly accurate. Then again, they were often the ones who owned their business, so it was their own money.

I’ve noticed that numbers often skip around at hospital clinics. This may be another case of a fucking stupid, rude foreigner who doesn’t understand how things actually work.