the atm can learn from my fantasy football league

Every time I use an ATM, I marvel how I’ve never once seen the machine spit out the wrong amount of money. It seems inevitable, right? At the very least, you’d think every once in a while two twenties would get stuck together or something. But so far, my lifetime record at the ATM in terms of getting free extra money is 0-853 (approximately).

I’m surprised for another reason beyond my ‘something has to go wrong, eventually, if you do it a lot’ approach to life - I’m surprised because almost every time I use an ATM, I find some new aspect of its setup to complain about. Consider a recent trip I made to my bank’s ATM. After I put my card in, I was asked to enter my PIN. I punched in my top-secret password, 1234, and waited.

And waited...

And…

Finally, after standing there like a penniless dumbass for almost a minute, I realized I needed to hit ‘enter’ on the keypad. Did the screen that had prompted me to enter my card and prompted me to type in my four-digit number prompt me to hit enter? Of course not - after being directed on how to complete every step of using an ATM like a small child, for some reason the ATM decided I had to figure this one last little step out for myself.

But reader, you might be thinking - this isn't a huge issue. And I agree! All I had to do was think for myself - big deal, right? Well, reader, allow me to continue my tale of dough...

After I hit enter, I was asked to provide the details of my withdrawal. I hit $10000 because I’m a high roller. But… no chance to hit enter and confirm! The ATM simply accepted my input and the money came flying out of the f’ing thing like bees fleeing a burning hive!

You’d think, reader, that of the two steps I described above, the importance of hitting ‘enter’ would be emphasized in the step the ATM could know nothing about – the withdrawal amount! Instead, the bank that can’t wait to screw over their own customers with overdraft fees demands I hit enter to confirm the four-digit number - a fact the ATM is more than capable of determining as correct since my debit card is inside the machine the whole time!

This nonsense reminded me, of all things, about the smartest rule I ever came up with for my fantasy football league. It was back when we were transferring our league from the ancient ‘pen and paper’ setup to a fully online service. The benefit would be in the admin – the service would tally scores, track rosters, and allow league members to make changes that I had originally spent a lot of time writing down. The move was very promising and would greatly improve the experience for the league. However, in this transition, we agreed on one thing – we would never change our system due to something the online service provided ‘by default’. We would only use the online service to help us do what we were already doing – if there was a feature the online service didn’t support, we would continue to do that on our own offline.

My bank could learn from the spirit of this rule. If I walked into the main branch and asked to withdraw $100 instead of the $20 I’d intended, the teller wouldn’t hand me $100 just because I said the larger number first – if I spotted my error and corrected myself, I would get the revised amount. In fact, this is the very reason why most banks require in-person withdrawals to be written down on a piece of paper - it gives the teller the chance to confirm the transaction with the customer before proceeding.

And yet, despite how simple this setup is, the ATM insists on doing the opposite - when it comes to the dollar amount, no confirmation needed. The ATM is said to have replaced the teller in many ways but this isn’t fully accurate from my experience – I would say in the ATM has replaced the teller, but sometimes with a greedier version who is hell-bent on tricking customers into pointless overdraft charges.