The first symptom of an existential crisis is a disturbance in the perception of time. When someone has sat at the same window for six years, time is no longer a linear river. It becomes an unmarked expanse of water.
At ten to nine in the morning, he puts on his uniform, fastens the buttons, and glances at the mirror in the changing room. The person in the mirror wears a navy blue suit with a badge on the lapel, his name and an employee number. He knows that in ten minutes, that number will matter more than his name. He walks to the counter, sits down, turns on the computer, enters his password. The system boots up. At nine oclock, the shutter rises. This is his sixth year at this bank, at this window.
In the beginning, everyaction felt fresh. Counting cash, checking signatures, authorisations, stamping. Everyaction had weight. By the sixth year, these movements had become muscle memory. He can process a transaction while thinking about what to have for dinner, his brain and bodycompletely separated. At the end of the day, he cannot remember a single transaction or a single face. Time has flowed through him like water, leaving no trace.
This is not just about repetitive work. Repetition does not necessarily lead to alienation. A craftsman repeats the same movements every day, but each repetition hassubtle differences and improvement. The bank teller predicament is different: his work has been designed to eliminate variation. Every process has been standardised. Every decision has been taken away from him. He is not required to judge, only to execute. He is not required to create, only to comply. He is not a service provider. He is an interface of the system.
The real crisis is not that the work istedious. It is that he knows, clearly, that the system is accelerating toward his obsolescence. ATMs eliminated seventy percent of teller positions. Mobile banking is eliminating the remaining thirty. Everything he does every day is being replaced line by line by code. He sits there not because the system needs him, but because the system is not quite ready to replace him yet.
That is when he started noticing small changes. During his lunch break, he takes a few extra minutes. At the end of the day, when balancing the books, he deliberately slows down. He is not slacking off. He is stretching the time during which he is still useful. In an almost imperceptible way, he is resisting the approaching nothingness.