modern fairytales

Friday, apr. 7, 2006   |   0 comments

Can you think of any reason why an otherwise reasonable looking man would ever be talking to an Automatic Teller Machine? Like leaning down to get his face right up to the card slot and saying, “Can I have my card back, please?” and “Hello? Hello?” Because while I’m pretty sure banks don’t employ wee people to live inside their ATMs (because that would be depressing and cost ineffective), something about the calm sureness with which this man addressed the cold metal machine made me doubt everything.

Maybe he was secretly blind, and what I was seeing was just a new high-end verbal interface for the visually impaired? Or maybe it’s a new form of customer support, a kind of radio-operated help mechanism that patches people throuh to an ATM technician with a binder script in Bali? Or! A mystical menace had taken over the ATM, like a 21st century version of the troll beneath the bridge? Or Candid Camera.

Update: Jill emailed me to report that on very rare occasions (one of which she herself was lucky enough to be a part of), a person’s card gets eaten at the exact same moment a maintenance worker is doing his job “behind the curtain,” and that person can actually be heard talking and shuffling by the frustrated banker out front. So that’s almost surely the explanation for the Man Who Talked to the Slot, though in truth I was really gunning for the “crazy man with suspicions of goblin” option.