Assured Technical Madness

Don't you just love the convenience and efficiency of those ATMs?


There I was at my local bank this morning withdrawing money from the ATM to pay the plumber who was expected at my place just twenty minutes later. The ATM thoughtfully swallowed my ATM card without warning at the same time failing to produce any of my requested withdrawal.

The ATM beeped at me, closed it's shutter and cheerfully informed me I was 'timed out' and that it had retained my card. I raced into the adjoining bank branch and joined a suspiciously unhappy looking queue for service. I quickly learnt that most of those ahead of me had also had their cards retained by the recalcitrant ATM and what's more those joining the queue behind me were newcomers to the list of annoyed card retained customers.

A teller appeared after a while with a handful of retained cards which were returned to us once we proved identity and then we had to wait whilst they checked our unsuccessful ATM transactions one by one.

You'd think the Manager would have shut down the ATM in the mean time but when eventually my transaction was checked out and I left the branch I noticed it was continuing its card chewing ways with newly arrived customers.