Sympathy for RBS staff

I daresay that not too many of you feel very sorry for the staff of RBS at the moment. Usually we only talk to the bank when things go wrong. They overcharge us, they cock up our mortgage, they get our electricty cut off by stopping our direct debits. That sort of thing. As if that wasn't bad enough, the bloke who used to run it got paid millions in bonuses, crashed the bank, got bailed out by you & me (the taxpayer) and then swanned off with a big fat payoff and a gold lined pension. I'd say that Sir Fred Goodwin is near the top of most people's list of people they wouldn't even urinate on if he caught fire.

We don't like our banks much right now, deservedly so. I was however rather saddened by a little story I was told last night. A good friend of mine works for RBS. She was at the Morrissey gig (she's a Moz nut) and we shared a cab back. As we were coming back, she told me that the previous evening she'd been drinking with Morrissey's crew til 6am (what a girl, she then did a full days work, only pausing for a shower and a change of clothes). One of the friends of the crew, on finding out she was an RBS employee had subjected her to a long tirade of bile about what a terrible person she was for working for RBS. She explained that unlike Fred, she got no bonus at all this year. She's got a mortgage to pay and she doesn't even know how long she'll have a job. She'd been harangued with "How can you justify this, how can you justify that".

The point is that 99.9% of the staff are not to blame for the global recession or anything else. They do humdrum jobs for not much money. Sure some are rude, some are unhelpful, but no more so than any other firm. I happen to think it's pig ignorant to ruin someones evening purely because they work for a company where a few guys at the top have behaved badly. By all means slag off Sir Fred if you see him, but blaming everyday bank workers is cruel, nasty and spiteful.