On any average eight-hour day, Pam Kurose, head teller at the Manoa branch of First Hawaiian Bank, may flip through $50,000 or more in cash.

Kurose, who lives a mile from where she works, arrives at the bank at 7:30 a.m. She started out as a part-time teller in college and figured she'd stay in banking for a year. That was 1976. Today, she's still counting cash.

"I've been a teller, I've been a supervisor, I've been in audit, I've been in branch servicing, I've been in the back office and I've been in the front office," says the mother of two daughters, ages 7 and 10.
"Right now I'm the teller trainer."

The first thing she looks for in a potential teller is cash-handling experience such as working a cash register at McDonald's or a supermarket.

"You may not be flipping the money the way we do it, but you'll learn."

Accuracy comes first. Speed comes second. Kurose has never clocked the speed at which she can riffle and count $2,000 in $20 bills. But she knows how accurate she is.

Completely.

"Accuracy is your primary concern," she reiterates.

Kurose can teach a trainee things the average person doesn't know about money — such as how thick a 10-grand wad is.

"When you see a game show and the host goes, ‘We have ten thousand dollars!' and I'm like, ‘Yeah, I know how big that is — not even an inch.' And they have it in a huge suitcase. Yeah. It's probably all ones."

Kurose shows a trainee the way to hold the bills. But she explains that people develop different techniques. Some have a different touch. Handle money as long as Kurose has and you learn to spot a bogus bill simply by the feel of it.

Otherwise, she says, touching large sums of money day in and day out is like any other job. You get used to it.

"I have to take care of the money. I have to be responsible for the money. But it's not mine, so it's no big deal."

After she closes the door behind her at 4:30 p.m., Kurose is as cash-strapped as almost everybody else.

"I'm lucky if I've got a $20 bill in my wallet," she says.