When the calls were done, Dani asked for the door back.
Headquarters had imagined, insofar as headquarters had imagined anything, that she would be eased into a back-office role with a development plan attached, the kind of quiet relocation by which institutions apologize to employees they have wronged without ever quite saying so. Dani declined it in writing, in the new style she had acquired, which was to say plainly and on one page. She wrote that she had been hired for the door, trained wrong for the door, and had done her repair at a telephone, and that if the bank intended the door to be different, then the door was where the difference ought to be worked, by the person who best understood the cost of the old way, which was her. She asked, further, to help write the standard she would be working under, since she had some experience of standards that could not survive being read beside the bank's values, and she would like the new one proofread against page one by somebody who had failed the old one.
The standard, when it emerged from the region's process three weeks later, was two pages long, and half of the second page was Dani's, though her name appeared nowhere on it, which she said was correct, standards being doors and not portraits. The first rule was printed in the imperative mood, a novelty in bank documents, which generally prefer the fog of the passive. Nobody is pointed anywhere until somebody has asked their name and what they came for. The second rule abolished the four seconds. In their place it prescribed a different discipline entirely: the greeter's assessment was to be made not of the client but of the errand, and the only instrument authorized for the purpose was a question. Seating was not a privilege of scheduling. Coffee was not a category. If a banker was free, a banker was free, and the chairs in the glass offices did not outrank the chairs in the lobby, and any client whose business could not be served at Riverside was to be told why, by a person, with the name of the person who would serve it elsewhere and an introduction made by telephone before the client left the building, so that nobody ever again carried their own errand across town like a letter no one would sign for.
"Warmly redirected," Dani said, reading the final draft at the curved desk, "is dead. I checked twice. It isn't in there in a wig, either."
Dolly, who had been installed at the service desk with her new title and without the lanyard, which she had returned to human resources in an envelope marked, simply, No, supervised the new doctrine the way she had supervised everything for forty-one years, by knowing where everyone was. The bank had given her, at her own request, an official notebook this time, bound in the bank's blue with the tower in silver, and she kept it exactly as she had kept the other, names and dates and errands, except that the outcomes column had changed its vocabulary. Seated. Banker. Notary, Thursday, by name. Coffee, declined, chair accepted. The notebook no longer recorded a tragedy in shorthand. It recorded a lobby, working, and Dolly said the handwriting was less interesting and the reading considerably better, and that a woman could get used to dull evidence.
The interim manager, a steady woman sent down from Coeur d'Alene who answered questions in the order they were asked and kept her office door at the angle of a person who expects to be interrupted by actual life, did the wisest thing available to her. She let the door alone, and watched it, and in the watching learned her branch faster than any report could have taught it. When the region asked her, at quarter's end, how the new standard was performing, she sent them Dolly's outcomes column, anonymized, four pages of it, with a cover note consisting of one sentence: The lobby is slower and the clients are faster, because they are no longer spending their visit arguing that they have one.
In November they hired a second greeter, a young woman named Lucia Ferrero, twenty-two, quick and funny and terrified in the particular way of people who have been told that a job is simple by people who have never done it in weather. Dani trained her. It took a week, and it bore no resemblance to Dani's own training except in the standing.