solved

That ATM problem was finally solved, 16 days after it occurred. And I’m not sure that it would have been solved today, except that I had to go into “screw it, I’m shouting at all of them until I get someone with the power to fix things” mode, always a very unpleasant role to play. All of those bank customer service people have been faultlessly polite and calm at all times, yet still they’ve been contradicting themselves and leading me down dead ends for 16 days amidst all their calmness. In the end, a “Mr. Big” supervisor called to apologize in the evening and said I’d receive the money tomorrow morning: but even that was wrong, since they already gave it to me tonight.

The most unnerving part is that they never gave me a reason for why the problem was finally solved. If the supervisor had said something like “we’re really sorry, but it took a long time for the technicians to break into the machine and find the right part on the closed-circuit footage to prove you were telling the truth,” that would’ve been strangely reassuring. But now I’m left with the feeling that they simply decided on this basis: “Well, he’s been calling us constantly for two weeks, and he’s also a professor/administrator at the university that is one of our biggest depositors, so let’s just assume he’s telling the truth.” The solution seemed to come from nowhere.

It’s still a bit weird… ATM’s are one of those machines that seem like they ought to mess up frequently (exactly counting small and slippery/clingy items like pieces of currency doesn’t seem like it should be as easy as it apparently is). But in 20+ years of using these machines, I’ve never once had them make a mistake until now (and it happened to be the largest ATM withdrawal of my life, ironically!).