This past Friday evening (yes, less than 24 hours prior to the dreaded Dick’s Sporting Goods Bathroom Fiasco – so it was a banner fucking weekend for me) I decided I would withdraw some cash from a nearby ATM so I would have a little money in my wallet for the night. Although I dreaded the $1.50 surcharge, I decided to stop by an ATM close to my home, as I didn’t feel up to driving through the Friday rush-hour traffic just to withdraw from one of my credit union’s ATMs.
The transaction starts out innocently enough. Yeah, give it to me in English. Yes, I accept your $1.50 surcharge. Yes, I would like to be lubed up with K-Y jelly before you take it. You know, the usual stuff. I decided to accept the “Fast Cash” option of a $20 withdrawal from checking.
There’s a whirr. There’s a shuffling. There’s another whirr. And then the ATM spits the $20 bill out of the ATM as if it dreamed it were a slot machine in another life. The bill bounces off my car and drops into the darkness.
Remember the scene in the movie Happy Gilmore when Happy putts into the clown’s mouth, only to have it hawk it back up and spit it at him before laughing it up? This was exactly like that, minus the clown, the putters and golf ball, and Adam Sandler and Carl Weathers. I didn’t say minus the hawking noise and the laughing, because in my mind, that was exactly what this fucking ATM was doing to me.
Of course, it’s instinct to open the car door if you drop something. It’s even more of an instinct if that something is $20 cash. I open the door, and crash – right into the post next to the ATM. And as I completely expected, as if there was some Director off-camera that was filming an episode of Candid Camera and gave his cue, a car pulls up behind me.
I pull forward about 10 feet – just enough to clear the ATM area and have enough room to look where my car was, and the car behind me immediately pulls up to the ATM. Because I’m making a bee line for the ATM, I notice the middle-aged woman in the driver’s seat staring at me wide-eyed, her window now going up as quickly as it’d been coming down. What the fuck? Am I going to be maced next? Is she going to floor it and turn me into a hood ornament? I raised my hands to show I meant nothing, probably looking more like an attacking bear in her headlights. As I reached her car, I loudly told her I dropped my money. And thank God there was no strong breeze or wind on this night, for there was my $20 bill – my “Fast Cash,” and now I know why it’s called as such – resting in a small puddle of dirty oil.
I raise my oily prize to the woman in the car, and she smiles back. The window drops again. “Thank you for telling me!” she says. “No problem. Didn’t mean to scare you,” I offered back. The oily bill would later be passed to a grocery store clerk, who asked if I received the bill in change from the gas station in their parking lot.
And no, I did not buy toilet paper, either. Had I know what Saturday would bring, I surely would have. Next time, I’ll know better.
I don’t know about the little ‘nuggets’ of wisdom, though. Somehow, I don’t think that the local fiduciary establishments know shit about Dick.