Not-so-automatic cash machine.
I had reason to withdraw some cash this morning. Nothing anyone needs to know about, especially not the authorities. Just… reasons.
Luckily, I was passing through the city, which is one of the few places my Very Large Bank still maintains a branch, let alone a cash machine. My Very Large Bank has decided to get out of the business of real money because, I dunno, it costs too much or something.
So, there I was, at the cash machine, card in hand trying to withdraw the folding stuff. The first hurdle I hit was a message telling me there wasn’t enough money in the account.
Bullshit.
I knew exactly how much was in the account because I had just checked it.
Trued again.
Same message.
I climbed through the on-screen decision tree, looking for some button I could push to make everything better, discovering after five or six frustrating minutes that there was nothing I could do because the fucking bank had decided to link my card to the wrong account.
I did some breathing exercises and tried again, this time hitting the ‘right’ account. Card error, the machine told me. More breathing. I fell back to the app, which allows you to turn your phone into a card. System error, the machine told me.
More breathing.
Honestly, my daily meditation practice has been a godsend.
I moved to another machine. This one considered giving me some money but couldn’t quite make up its mind. After two minutes, it decided it, too, was having a System Error and shut down.
For the next few minutes, I decided to forego my breathing exercises and indulge in some cursing and shouting at the Very Large Bank, as it seemed they had ‘withdrawn’ the amount I was asking for without ponying up the cash.
Luckily, that was just another Systems Error.
I did some more breathing. I tried a third machine.
After a lot of thinking, about two minutes by my watch, it finally gave up the cash.
Total time: eighteen minutes.
Rage, fear and loathing induced - incalculable.
Man, I thought attempting to deposit a cheque with a certain Very Large Bank who bought up my Much Smaller Bank during the GFC and then decided to move that Much Smaller Bank to being a completely online only presence recently was hard.
Partially my fault because the share registry for my employee shares didn't have my bank details to directly deposit my dividends into, and had to send me a physical cheque for $12.34 like some quaint olde worlde dispenser of capitalist excess.
The disappearance of my Much Smaller Bank's branch network meant that I couldn't pop into a branch to deposit it, and I had to do some Google-fu to discover I could deposit the cheque via an ATM of the Very Large Bank instead. Of course I then had to find an ATM that accepted deposits into the Very Large Bank, and that proved more difficult that I had anticipated. I finally stumbled across one outside a branch in a shopping centre, and it only took me 4 tries and what felt like a decade for the ATM to accept the admittedly slightly shopworn cheque that had been lurking in my wallet for the last 8 months.
I can't imagine the agonies of attempting to extract money from the Very Large Bank if this is how difficult they make giving them money *shudder*.
Which bank was it? or a different one?