Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The following is my reply to a question from Miss. Swamp. You can read her whole question on the comments of ASK VIOLA. I will sum it up here for you as well. Miss. Swamp is concerned that the Bank Employees are watching and even laughing at her when she is using the ATM. This has lead her to make faces, order food, and shout at the machine.

Miss. Swamp,

It is my Father who plays the Harp, my Mother plays the Tuba, but I can see how you could confuse the two.

As far as your ATM fixation. Well, yes the bank employees do watch you and they do laugh. The reason I know this is because my 6th job, was as a Bank Teller. Mondays are very slow at the bank so to spice things up a bit we had Maniac Monday. This is where all the bank employees sit around and watch the tapes from the ATM machine. We only would watch the tape from the previous weekend, since weekends are when most people use the ATM. We had categories that we voted on, such as Deepest nose picker, Best Primper, The Best Scratcher. Then we would pause the tape as each person walked up and we would bet to see which ones would do things like count using their fingers or pull out their "secret" pin number from their wallet, or try to talk to the machine. (this happens more than you think.) SO yes, Miss Swamp you are being watched and laughed at.
I would however, advise you not to order cheeseburgers or yell at the Machine. At my particular bank there was an employee named Dave. Dave felt a bit insecure about being a Teller. You see Dave felt that being a Teller was a woman's job and it was a bit of an identity crisis for him. It didn't help that Dave was, in fact, the only male Teller at the bank or in the town for that matter. He also was a tad bitter because, before working at the bank he had attended Yale Law School and had flunked out. So he really was a prime candidate for slipping over the edge. You see, you are not the only person who makes faces and yells at the ATM camera and each time an individual would do this Dave took it personally. Then the fateful day came when someone ordered a cheeseburger. It sent Dave over the edge. You see when Dave flunked out of Yale his advisor said, "Dave, I think you're more suited to flip burgers than to practise law." This struck Dave at the heart and he never really recovered from that harsh criticism. Well, Dave did some serious research to find the name and account number of the customer who ordered a cheeseburger. He liquidated all of the poor man's accounts and transferred his money into other people's accounts. He sold the man's personal information to every Liberal Charity organization known to man so that he was continually hounded with phone calls from the Arbor Day Foundation, The EPA, Greenpeace, and others that are just too numerous and hideous to put here in this article. Needless to say the poor man, who made the simple immature gesture of ordering a burger at the ATM to make the women he was taking on a blind date laugh, was ruined.
So Miss. Swamp I would suggest that you seek out some help for your little problem. You never know where the next Dave may be working.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Viola...PLEASE send me Dave's email...phone#, whatever...he sounds so cool and smart (Yale!!!)
I like a man w/good investigative skills...and one that won't just take such immature behavior sitting down!!...cheeseburger man got what he deserved, if you ask me!! Waiting eagarly, Older Woman:)

Anonymous said...

Older Woman;

I'd love to send you Dave's info, the problem is that Dave is no longer with us. In prison, the ohter guys started calling him Cheese (ya know, like cheeseburger). Well, Dave couldn't take it and made a shank. Being a Yale boy though, he wasn't really good at that short of thing. When he tried to use his homemade shank on a 350lb man with numerous tatoos, things didn't go well. So sorry for you.