A fool and the Automated Teller Machine
3 Comments Published by Apocalyptus on Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 2:17 PM.
ATM - Automated Teller Machine has become a must in a modern common man's life. Some people wrongly (but confidently as if they are right!) refer to it as Any Time Money too.
Monetary transactions were never so easy before this invention reached people. Everyone who holds a bank account has an ATM-card these days. This invention has made lives of common people much easier as compared to what they were like until a few years back when depositing/withdrawing/transferring money meant standing in a long queue waiting to be attended to by a human teller who most of the times would be more interested and absorbed in chatting with his/her colleagues or than serving the people in the queue as fast as possible.
But wait, I'm not writing an essay about ATMs or how they have changed our lives as the name and the beginning of this post may suggest. Instead, I just wish to share one of the couple of weird experiences I have had while waiting in the queue in various ATMs.
Incident:
Place : A busy ATM at the heart of Bangalore.
Time : 10:40 in the morning.
A formally dressed gentleman rushes inside the ATM hut. None of the three machines is free. Anguish and disgust show all over his face. Cursing God knows whom he has to stand in the shortest queue which has two people before him. He doesn't have to wait for more than 3-4 minutes but still looks desperately at his wrist-watch at least thrice while waiting. Clearly he is in real hurry.
His turn comes. He swipes his card, enters the PIN and selects the 'Check Balance' option. Although the balance is displayed on the screen, he seems unhappy and asks for a printout of the same.
When the 'Another Transaction ? - Yes / No' screen comes, he selects 'No'. The printout comes out and he looks minutely at it for almost a minute. Still not convinced how the balance could be so low/high he again swipes his card, enters his PIN and asks for a mini-statement. Once he gets the mini-statement, he looks somewhat satisfied with the details printed in it but again chooses the 'No' option when the 'Another Transaction?' screen comes. Therefore he has to swipe the card and enter his PIN again.
He needs to withdraw Rs 20,000 but the one-time maximum withdrawl limit is set as Rs 4,000 only. Therefore, he has to withdraw the money five times, everytime selecting the 'No' option at the end and thus swiping the card and entering the password every time.
Finally, when he is done with his transaction, he touches his tongue with his index finger and thumb and starts counting the notes one-by-one without even moving an inch from his position in the queue to check whether or not the ATM has cheated him. I wonder what he would have done had the machine given out wrong number of notes to him.
Therefore, the person who thought three minutes was too long a time to be waiting in the queue in an ATM kept a dozen of others waiting for about twenty-five minutes just to make one simple monetary transaction.
The moral of the story : The world is full of educated idiots.
Wait wait...this is NOT the end. Look who's there in the ATM...
The incident isn't as funny as it looks like. In fact, like you and like me there are thousands of people who bump into such idiots in ATM huts. I hope some of those fools also read your post.
Nice one !
- Avi
Thanks, Avi. :)
I too have had some such incidents. There are, indeed, irritating people like that...not only in ATMs but just everywhere.
Nice point made.