Machine finally proves itself worthy of mistrust

The first ATM arrived in my town back when I was still in high school. For young readers this would have been shortly after the Ice Age but just before global warming.

It was a simpler time, one with four distinct seasons, and I remember passing the bank one cold winter day as workmen were jackhammering a big hole through the exterior brick wall. I wondered whether they were actually doing something productive or instead simply tunneling into the vault in broad daylight under the guise of honest work. I’ve always had a wild imagination. Perhaps I should have been a novelist. (Or maybe a bank robber?)

Anyhow, I learned later over the dinner table from my older sister who worked at the bank that they were installing something called an “automated teller machine.” Our mother was indignant.

“What’s it going to do, watch me sign my name to a check and then hand me back dollar bills?” she scoffed. “I wouldn’t trust it.”

True to her word for all the remaining decades of her life, she never did “trust it,” nor did she ever even attempt to use it. I was a much easier sale for the banking industry. The idea of not having to wait in a double line of exhaust-belching Novas, Volares, Granadas and Delta 88s seemed just the ticket for me. The ATM presented itself as a perfect invention, right up there with FM radio and the cassette tape, each sent from the technology gods to make my young life even more wonderful.

Through three or four bank mergers, a dozen different plastic cards and multiple upgrades of technology, that same magnificent marvel that began as a simple hole in the wall served me unfailingly … until it didn’t.

Last week I ran to the store just before closing to get bananas and milk, the two staples without which our household would collapse upon itself. The trip, taken twice weekly, consistently rings in at 15-20 minutes max. When Kristin finally called to make sure I was still alive, I’d already been gone 45 minutes.

“I was passing by the bank and figured I’d deposit this check real quick,” I said. “When I put my card in, it just sat there and blinked at me.”

“So punch cancel and get on with your life,” she said. “I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“The big deal is that I did that 20 minutes ago and it went all blue screen on me and started to reboot. It’s still rebooting. It has been all this time.”

“So just drive away,” she said.

“And as soon as I do, it’ll finish the reboot and some schmuck will happen by just as my card shoots out of the machine,” I groused. “Have you no sense of the sinister thoughts and actions of random passersby?”

“Ugh, why does it always have to be a movie plot with you?” she said. “Fine, waste the whole night for all I care.”

I would have wasted the whole night had the machine not reached the end of its glacial restarting process only to flash, “This machine is temporarily out of service.”

I barely slept a wink and called the bank first thing in the morning and spoke with one of the few humans still employed therein.

“Oh, the ATM wouldn’t have just randomly spit your card back out,” she said. “If it keeps your card, it just shreds it. Just stop by and we will print you another.”

I could practically hear my mom laughing, “I told you so!”

Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.