Update: Amid fresh media coverage of the episode, U.S. Bank’s CEO issued a statement Saturday night acknowledging “mistakes.” He said “I will fix this.” Read more here.

On Christmas Eve, Abigail Gilbert, a supervisor at a U.S. Bank call center in Portland, made a split-second decision that changed her life.

One of her employees, Emily James, came up to her with a request to leave the building.

“She explained to me there’s this guy who’s stuck at a gas station, he’s really close to us, we’ve held up the check for two days,” Gilbert said. “I don’t think she even asked me for the $20. I just gave it to her.”

She told James to go.

“It was just, 'If I can fix this, let’s just fix it,' and that wasn’t a good business decision,” Gilbert said. “It was an emotional decision.”

But that decision had consequences.

James was fired on Dec. 31, for what she was told was an “unauthorized interaction with a customer.”

Gilbert was fired at the end of the week, on Jan. 3.

And Gilbert knows why James initially said the money had been hers.

“She was trying to protect me,” Gilbert said. At the time, James wasn’t sure of Gilbert’s fate with the company. James was ready to use her own money, but accepted the gift from Gilbert.

Gilbert described the incident as “two impassioned people who reacted rather than thought, and tried to do the right thing.”

James had been working for two days trying to help customer Marc Eugenio get a hold taken off his paycheck from a new job ahead of Christmas. Eugenio followed her instructions and went to his local Clackamas bank branch to have the funds verified from the issuing bank and have his company verify his employment. But because of the holiday, the branch was closing early, and Eugenio was told there was no manager on site able to lift the hold.

When Eugenio left the bank, he said workers locked the doors behind him.

That afternoon, he again called James at the call center, saying he was stranded at a gas station without money to even fill his tank. Though the call center helps customers from across the country, Eugenio happened to be just miles away in Portland.

James asked if she could drive to the gas station and give him money to get home.

Gilbert said yes.

“I’ve also come to peace with it, that being who I am, it’s inevitable that that’s the decision that I would have made,” Gilbert said. “I just know if it was to happen again, I would have done that same thing in that moment in time.”

But Gilbert thinks ire at U.S. Bank is misplaced. She loved working there and would work there again, she said, if given the chance.

“I’m not angry,” Gilbert said. “I understand from their viewpoint that they made the right decision. I also understand from my viewpoint that Emily and I made the right decision, so it’s just a question of viewpoint.”

Rather than approve James’ request to run money out to the stranded customer, Gilbert said, she should have called her boss for options.

“U.S. Bank is not an evil corporation,” she said. “They’re a big corporation, and they have to have rules and policies. I understand what they did from their perspective.”

Gilbert was hired by the bank in June, went though training and started working as a supervisor in August, she said.

“I had only been on the job for about six months and I did not have a banking background, I had a customer service background,” Gilbert said. She’d previously worked in retail and call center management, she said, and she was grateful U.S. Bank took a chance on her.

At age 70, the job market can be difficult.

“They knew what they wanted and they saw it in me,” she said. “I am not a technological whiz, they knew that. They knew what they were getting, and they hired me, and I have enormous respect for that. I understand in the scope of the stories that are being told, that people would be mad at the bank. I don’t think it’s fair to taint all of U.S. Bank with that anger because they do a lot of things right.”

She said she was devastated when she heard James had been fired. And she was shocked, though perhaps not altogether surprised, when she was terminated three days later. When originally contacted about the incident, Gilbert didn’t return a reporter’s phone calls.

“I would not have made it public,” Gilbert said. “I would have just gone on. I’m just trying to move forward. I don’t want to play the blame game.”

But she said she was not surprised by James’ reaction.

“She’s passionate. She has a very strong sense of what’s right and wrong. I’m probably more introspective,” Gilbert said. “I have bowed out of this, it’s not who I am. It’s not to negate Emily’s anger. It’s just that my response is different. At her age, I probably would have been Emily.”

Gilbert said she avoided reading coverage of her firing, and she deleted links to stories when friends sent them. On Saturday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof opined about the incident, as an example of how “some companies have lost their souls.”

Gilbert is applying for other jobs, and has been upfront that she was fired from her last job. She’s been surprised when those hiring already have heard about her story.

“It has certainly devastated me — financially, emotional, all of that — but I’m just trying to move forward,” she said.

-- Samantha Swindler; sswindler@oregonian.com; @editorswindler

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