My ATM cash grab
On a recent trip to Scotland I stopped at a small service station off the M90 in Fife. I was looking for an ATM because I needed cash and I got lucky because I found one directly outside WH Smith.
I inserted my card, entered my PIN number, and asked for a not insubstantial sum of money. Prompted by the machine, I also requested a receipt. ‘Receipt unavailable’ I was informed. Did I want to proceed? ‘Yes’.
The ATM then returned my card and whirred into action. After about a minute (much longer than an ATM usually takes) it stopped, thanked me for my business, and reset itself for the next customer. I’d like to say it also delivered the money but it didn’t and I was left scratching my head because that’s never happened to me before.
I asked a member of staff at WH Smith if they could help but they explained that the ATM was nothing to do with them. There was however a phone number on the machine that I could call, so I went back to my car and rang it, but only after confirming that the money had indeed been deducted from my bank account.
Would it surprise you to know that it took several attempts before I spoke to a real person and although he was helpful he couldn’t help, not directly. I had to call my bank, he said, and make a claim through them, which is what I did. And lo and behold, a few days ago, I received a message from my bank to say my claim ‘has been accepted and your account will be re-credited shortly’.
So all’s well that ends well, but it was a strange experience because what struck me was how powerless I felt. When the ATM reset for the next customer and no money had been delivered I just stood there, staring at the screen and feeling a bit stupid.
As I say, I don’t remember this ever happening before, which is incredible when you think about it because, like most people, I must have used ATMs hundreds if not thousands of times, so it’s a credit to these machines that they are so reliable - unlike, say, a desktop printer or photocopier.
Funnily enough, I’ve never forgotten the very first time I saw an ATM. Or, should I say, heard it. It was outside a branch of Lloyds Bank in Victoria Street, London, and I’m guessing that the year was 1980. It was quite late in the evening - ten or eleven o’clock - and there were very few people around and what I heard was a loud beeping noise.
I turned my head to see where it was coming from and I saw someone standing in the shadow of the bank facing what we used to call the ‘hole-in-the-wall’. When I realised what it was my first thought was, ‘Why on earth would a bank draw attention to the withdrawal of cash by accompanying it with a loud noise?’ And believe me, it was very loud. I could hear it from across the road.
Clearly, I didn’t have my own cash card at that time so it was a while before I started using ATMs myself, but very soon it was difficult to do without one. Also, the banks wanted you to have one because it meant they could reduce the number of cashiers they employed. And that, I believe, was when banks began to lose the personal touch.
In fact, it’s arguable that my generation was the last to benefit from having a personal bank manager. In my case, my first bank account, which I opened on my first day at university in Aberdeen, was with the Clydesdale, a Scottish bank now owned by Virgin Money, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t have many branches in the south of England. So the reason I opened an account with a bank in London was because I needed an easily accessible branch into which I could pay my first salary cheque.
My boss at the time suggested I open an account with his bank and his bank manager became my bank manager for a few years. Forty-five years later I’m still with the same bank but bank managers as we knew them disappeared long ago. In fact, I knew things were changing after my first bank manager retired and his replacement was a young fellow whose clear brief was to persuade me to sign up for this or that, with the obvious incentive being a lucrative commission (for him, not me).
I may be naive or nostalgic for an era that never existed, but I genuinely can’t imagine my first bank manager advising me to do anything that wasn’t in my best interests. But, as I subsequently discovered, banks are businesses not your friend, as I once imagined them to be. (That was quite a shock, I can tell you, and I was 35 when the penny dropped!)
Anyway here we are, 45 years after my first sight of an automated teller machine, having recently suffered my first and only ATM malfunction that, to be fair to both my bank and the ATM company, was soon resolved.
It has however made me a bit more wary of ATMs, albeit at the very moment they are disappearing (with the banks) from our high streets. Instead, we are living in what is increasingly a cashless society – and who would have predicted that when I arrived in London in my twenties?
Beep beep beep …
