I’ve lately evolved myself into a creature of the 21st century, meaning that whatever else I do or don’t do, I now pay for many purchases with my debit card. I hardly ever have to deal with ATM mochines any more.
This caught up with us once when we were travelling in the Czech Republic where we weren’t paying attention and accidentally withdrew something like $5000 instead of $50. Since it was the weekend, we had to walk around with $5000 worth of Czech Koruna until we finally found a bank that would allow us to convert it back.
A few banks in the KY/IN region will let you pull cash out in increments of $5.
Askance, the change function is for deposits. You don’t get that option to withdraw. For example, you could deposit, say, $138.72, but you can only pull out whole dollar amounts. You could only withdraw $120/$130 (depending on the machine), in the example I used.
My bank’s ATM does this, except the touch screen has the various amounts fairly close to each other. So, I’m trying to take out $60 and my finger is riiiiight next to the button for $200, and the damn screen isn’t all that well calibrated. You have to sort of hunt and peck around the button you’re trying to hit in order to get it to take, and I’m now pecking next to a button I don’t want to hit.
There’s also no confirmation step, so some day I’m going to wind up with $140 more than I want. Luckily, being at an ATM, I can deposit the cash right back into the account.
I am the guy, or at least one of them that you are pissed at. I wrote the ATM console code that is used in the ATMs that you see in two of the large convenience store ATMs.
There are a few things that you need to understand.
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All coding for ATMs uses the standards for ACH. The code functions the way it does because those is the rulz.
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Most of the ACH rules were established in the late 70’s, early 80’s when ATMs started popping up. Technology available today wasn’t available then. Changing things for thousands of banks to ensure standardization and conformity is like turning a large ship; it takes a while.
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Before you over-gripe because you have to enter amounts that you find unnecessary, remember that I have to code not just to YOU, but to the entire world and not only that, I have to code for what may come down the line in the future. A few extra or seemingly redundant keystrokes does not a bad system make.
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Have you noticed how damned fast your transaction is? You type in your keystrokes and less than 60 seconds (usually a LOT less than 60 seconds) later, you are holding money. My system has to be able to find your bank amongst thousands and thousands, make an ACH connection securely and perform all the validation to ensure that Petrov in Moscow isn’t hacking our system to steal your money AND deliver your money into your fat, bitching hand in less than a minute.
If I were you, I would worry more about donning surgical gloves to touch the keypads rather than bitching about four to five keystrokes.
WHINER.
Also, the braille on the drive up ATM keypads? That kind of stupid you can’t even blame on banks. It is required by the US Govt.
Genuinely, I’m not sure if this is a First World problem (= trivial) or not.
My Bank of New Zealand hole in the wall gives me the option of “$200 from Cheque Account No Statement”. It is fast and efficient.
I note that my various friends (40s - 50s) don’t use cash very much and I’m an unusual outlier. My late teen children on the other hand never have cash - everything is plastic.
The same coders that write ATM code also write the code for the point of sale consoles you use your debit card with. Typically, with the exception of say, 200-300 really large banks, most banks don’t write their own code for anything. Your bank likely outsources all of their technology needs to a company like mine.
Your online statement? You probably aren’t even looking at a page controlled by the bank. The odds are when you click the view my statement button, you are diverted to the website of the third party vendor who displays your data.
This. Another scenario could be massive deflation in the future that makes it so that $.01 is a lot of money. You wouldn’t want to make the programmers go back and re-implement stuff, would you?
Or, maybe the machine can be exported to other countries where in one, 10,000 units of money is a trifle, and in the other, the average monthly wage is 0.6 units. With a flexible ATM like you saw, they should be adaptable to local conditions pretty easily with a switch to the currency units option, a change to the “minimum” and “maximum” withdrawal units, and a change to the denomination units stocked in the machine (should just be a setting or two). No reprogramming necessary.
<3
It doesn’t have to be, plus there are these nifty features such as offering shortcuts for common amounts or for acceptable amounts. I’m used to ATMs that offer shortcuts (generic ones if you’re not a customer, specific if you are) as well as the possibility of entering a different amount. If you want one of the suggested amounts, just press that big button. My bank with the bad designers doesn’t have ATMs smart enough to offer shortcuts in 50€ increments or in 20€ increments when that’s the only available type of note, but others do.
If that happened, it probably wouldn’t cost more than a few cents for a programmer to go back and fix it.
Nah, they don’t even pay us that much; they just throw sandwiches into darkened programmer rooms. However, there are managers on multiple levels, project managers and business analysts who do expect to be paid.
Any change to code is big, BIG dollars to implement especially when spread across multiple ATM brands, types, countries, etc.
What I want to know is why it is the ATM requires me to re-enter my PIN number between depositing checks and depositing cash (yes, I have to do it separately, the machine wants it that way!) to the same account? It’s bad enough I’m taking time away from the impatient prick behind me to be doing deposits on the drive up ATM, but dammit, I need to use the drive up most days and he doesn’t.
Hell, why do I have to deposit checks and cash separately?
There was an ATM at my workplace that did just that - it dispensed change to the penny, probably so you could use the check cashing function on it - you could actually cash a check there (I think you had to have enough money to cover the amount in your account in case the check bounced, but don’t remember). You could, however, ask it it to give you $47.53 and you would get just that. You could also buy postage stamps. I don’t think it was common though, I worked at a place that handled ATM connections and monitored status of ATMs, so it was probably test ATM as much as a production ATM. Suffice to say it’s no longer there, probably because it tended to need attention more often than a ‘basic’ ATM.
Regarding your speculation that it was there in case of future upgrades, I somewhat doubt it - ATMs have different loads tailored to the hardware, you make an upgrade to a piece of hardware of an ATM, it requires a different load (OS) that has to be sent, even if you aren’t swapping out the ATM itself (some ATMs still run on 56k circuits, and some of the more modern loads can take a while to finish).
Thought you meant something like this.
Those gadgets that assume Debit + PIN until I hit a magic key? 2 out of 3 times the Cancel key is the magic key. 1 out of 3 times that cancels the transaction and the cashier glares at me. On one store’s machines the labels were placed ambiguously between the keys, so I couldn’t tell which one was for which key.
The whole credit/debit thing is apparently not needlessly complicated enough on its own—to liven things up, they manufacture twenty different kinds of POS terminals, each one slightly different.
The OP clearly says she has to type in cents to withdraw dollars:
[QUOTE=JcWoman]
Pressing each digit one by one to specify how much cash you want. When the machine only dispenses ten or twenty dollar bills, there’s no reason on this green earth that I should be able to type in amounts like these:
0.01
0.10
1.00
[/QUOTE]