Hmm. My hypothesis-slash-WAG on the ATM issue is that it’s less to do with actual inability to figure out how to use them, and more to do with fear of inability to do so.
It’s a problem I often encounter when teaching technophobes to use computers. They don’t understand that (on Windows, at least) it’s pretty damned hard to accidentally do something catastrophic. They’re afraid to take any action unless I tell them precisely what icons to click and what keys to press, because otherwise “I might delete my hard drive” or somesuch. In extreme examples, I’ve had it take hours before the person was willing to freely explore under the File menu when I give them the simple command “Save this document”.
Now imagine you’re standing at an ATM for the first time. You’ve never encountered one of these things before, but you know a few things for certain. You know that it allows you to directly manipulate your bank account, and to modify your finances and make withdrawls and deposits as you see fit. Essentially, it gives you all the powers of a bank teller as regards your account. You know these things, and you also know that you have no Earthly idea how to use it. For all you know, one wrong button press, and you’ve just sent $300 to a hole in Siberia, closed the remainder of your account, and told the bank to keep the change. Yeah, I can see being a bit timid at this proposition.
Just as a first-time computer user may take a week to open a Word document with any degree of confidence, so might an elderly person take an appreciable amount of time to feel secure making a simple deposit at an ATM. There is, however, one key difference: there’s no such thing as a Computer Teller. If you need to use a computer, you need to learn how to use a computer. There’s no practical way around it. If you need to make a deposit…well, there are these wonderful people that the bank employs specifically to help customers such as yourself do these things with no intervention on your part, that know exactly what menus to open and what buttons to press, and whom you trust to do things right because they’re trained and they’ve been doing it for years. Why, given this, would you ever bother to learn how to do it yourself in the first place? Sure, all those youngsters say it’s nearly impossible to mess up…but why take the risk? You just go inside like you’ve always done, give the teller the money and the piece of paper, and mission accomplished.
Of course, I’m 20, so what the hell do I know about how old people think? It’s an idea, though.
