RSR has long sung the virtues of an empowered, knowledgeable workforce. It’s time to also sing the virtues of employees who care enough to do the right thing in a timely way. I had a chance to see a dedicated employee in action, and I want to tell you about it. The woman in question was a bank manager, which is outside our typical beat, but boy, did she make a difference.

It all started when I was a bit careless with my handbag on Friday night. I hung it over the back of my chair in a restaurant, and even though I felt it jostled a few times, I thought it was the person sitting behind me. I was with some friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, and scarcely paid attention to the pull.

Saturday at around noon I got a call from a Bank of America bank manager in Plantation Florida. She asked me if I knew a woman (name omitted here). I said no and asked why. Apparently the woman was trying to cash a $4,000 check drawn on my account. The manager said “Even though the check looked right, something didn’t sit right with me, so I called the number on the account and asked a few questions. The answers were wrong. ” Not only had she not cashed the check, but the woman who tried to cash it was still in the bank, and the manager had called the police. She followed up with me several times, froze as many accounts as seemed appropriate and the perpetrator was taken into custody.

Tracking me down had not been easy. For a variety of reasons, I have more than seven different accounts associated with my name, many of which don’t have my current phone number on it. She went through about five of them before she found me on my mobile. But she kept at it. I think that’s the most important thing. She did not allow the check to be cashed until she got confirmation from me, and she called the police quite early in the process, just in case.

Now, this may seem like it was her job, and on some level, of course it was…but let’s contrast this with an experience a good friend of mine had a couple of years ago. I’m a co-signer on that account but really don’t use it. My friend lives in Boston. It was the same bank but a different branch; the same situation, but with a very different result.

At that time I received a call from a branch in New York saying a woman had just cashed a check on an account for $5,000 and after the fact, they’d realized the ID she used had been identified as one easily falsified. I was not the primary holder of this account, but acted as quickly as I could to freeze it. In the meanwhile, and while we were still on the phone, the same woman came back into the branch and having drained my friend’s checking account, proceeded to also drain her savings account. That was ALSO not realized until she’d left the branch. Eventually my friend got her money back, and technically the manager had done her job, but the second theft had me utterly flummoxed. All I could say was “Seriously??? You let it happen again??? On the same day??? ” And of course, it’s instructive that everything happened after the fact. The perpetrator was never found, and my friend had a real pain in the neck getting accounts re-established.

So Angella Coleman, thanks for your diligence. I still have a pain in the neck ahead of me in re-establishing those accounts we froze, but I know my money is safe and sound. [Feb 19 Update: Thanks to Miami Shores Bank of America employee Erlande Bien-Aime, re-establishing my accounts was also an easy, convenient and and pleasant experience. All in all, I have been very impressed!]

So, my retailer friends, I ask you this. Both branch managers did their jobs. But one went above and beyond the call of duty. One cared. The other was just “doing her job. ” Do you have the systems and procedures set up to find and nurture the kind of loyalty exhibited by the bank manager I worked with? Or in your world, are the manager in Canarsie, NY and the manager in Plantation, FL essentially identical? In that moment, the Bank of America stopped being an impersonal entity and became the face of Angella. And suddenly I’m feeling a bit of loyalty to the mega-bank. It got personal. I’ll make sure I give her “props ” to whoever I can.

And I’ll never hang my bag on the back of my chair again…nor will I carry a bag that doesn’t have a zipper closure.

While I’m on the subject, I’d also like to give some props to the state of Florida (which is always and easily maligned – no one forgets those dangling chads). It turns out Florida has a very handy service called VINE (Victims Information Network Everyday), which sends telephone updates to crime victims every time there’s a change in the status of the alleged perpetrator. While I didn’t really need a call at 5 am to let me know the perp had made bail, I could see how a battered woman pressing charges on her abuser would like to know that kind of information. Put one on the plus side for my home state.