ATM blues

I am often teased for being occasionally inept with ATMs. When I worked in town, there was an ATM on the ground floor of the heritage building in which the newspaper office was based. It was all a fairly new concept at the time and many people, not just me, had problems with it. I could manage most of the time, but occasionally failed to get the door open - it had to be swiped with the ATM card and almost always stuck. Of course, that started it. I would surely bog up the ATM, people said, rather nastily I thought. And my reputation as such survived.

But, compared to a lot of people, my record with ATM machines is pretty clean. I left my card in one only once and that was an emergency situation, where I had to deal with a crisis at work after a sudden phone call that pulled me away from the machine when I was just done taking out money. Of course, the bank charged me for a new card, but also upgraded me and never had me pay for that. Which all worked out for the best in the end. And ever since I remember, I have been using one of these facilities for everything from depositing money to taking it out, transferring it across accounts and making sure that all transactions were as they should have been.

So why am I moaning about these things if they work fine for me? Simple because the ATM I went to today misbehaved. I did everything it told me to, from feed in my card and then my password number, to specifying what service I wanted to access and whether it was indeed me. Short of giving the powers-that-be a retinal scan and DNA sample, I did it all right. But then it spat the card back out at me and said the machine was not working. At which point I stormed out of there and stomped away, saying some very rude words to myself.

Of course, the annoyance had a deeper root than the obvious. I knew the teasing, which had faded into almost non-existence after so many years of doing well with ATM machines and cards, would make a comeback that would have anyone sizzling a bit at the gills. And thus is is indeed.