Friday Morning at the Local ATM

Friday morning I was second in line at one of the two ATM machines in town. We rarely have a line, but it was the first day of the month, and many people’s checks are deposited then. In front of me a tiny little woman with her hair on top of her head like Pebbles Flintstone was putting her ATM card in the machine over and over. Her car was too far over from the machine, so she had gotten out in order to reach the slot better. Behind me, a guy sat in one of those huge trucks with huge wheels, not an eighteen-wheeler, just an unnecessarily large pick-up. I knew that any minute he was going to get mad because of the wait. Guys in trucks like that get angry quickly.

The lady at the ATM looked at me and waved, mouthing the words, “Help me.” I thought for a second. Well, I know you’re not supposed to get out and walk around at an ATM. The guy behind me might be a thief or a kidnapper or something like that. (On the other hand, big old overweight ladies hardly ever get kidnapped—ever notice that? It’s just too hard to drag them away.) Oh, well. The Pebbles lady would NEVER get finished if someone didn’t help her. I got out and went up to the ATM. Her problem was that she wanted to get out $600, more money than the machine would give at one time. (This is a safety feature built in because of guys like that one in the humongous truck behind me, no doubt.) Putting her card in over and over was not a good thing. I figured that at any moment the machine would rebel and refuse to give the rest of us any money at all; it IS out of order a great deal. The directions for the ATM were right at her eye level, but I am a fairly patient woman. Lots of people, including the students in my former high school English classes, never read anything, much less the directions to what they are working on. I moseyed back to my van and got in, relieved that no one had mugged me on this lovely morning in a small town in Georgia. I thought about how people rarely get mugged here, even though some people do get annoyed. About that time the guy in the truck ran out of patience and ROARED by Miss Pebbles and me, yelling obscenities as he went by. Yep, could have seen that one coming…

Well, she finally got her money. Miss Pebbles waved “Thank you” to me, got in the car, and headed down the road. The guy in the big truck probably got stopped by the local deputies for roaring down historic Main Street unless he is “kin” to all the locals. I pulled on up to the ATM and took my chances on its recently abused computer brain. Life goes on…