News
Day in the life
Think mail carriers have it rough with rain, sleet and snow? Consider the lot of the ATM service technician, who has to cope with card readers clogged with gum, mutilated cash cassettes and more.
February 10, 2002
Think mail carriers have it rough with rain, sleet and snow? Consider the lot of the ATM service technician, who has to cope with card readers clogged with gum, mutilated cash cassettes and more.
Who else but an ATM service technician would make an 8-hour drive from Buffalo, N.Y. to New Jersey in a Ford Escort station wagon loaded down with five ATMs?
Not exactly an average work day, but it happened to Rob Appenheimer.
Now employed with Efmark, Appenheimer's territory consists of western New York. At the time of the Escort run, however, Appenheimer was working for a smaller company and occasionally was dispatched on service calls that took him as far afield as Columbus, Ohio.
It wasn't the length of the trip to New Jersey that was unusual; it was the cargo. Appenheimer had to deliver five Tidel is1000s to another service company that had contracted with his employer for training.
Describing how he dealt with the logistical challenge, Appenheimer said, "I had three inside the car and two strapped to the hood."
A five-year veteran of the ATM service technician business, Appenheimer named that delivery as his most unusual on-the-job experience. Running a close second, he said, was the time he was sent to a local gaming establishment on a vandalism call.
When he arrived, he found the machine "completely trashed," with vault wide open and cassette gone. Yet it was the local fire department - not thieves - who had gutted the machine. In order to complete their investigation and determine whether any cash was missing, they performed a literal hatchet job - using fire axes to break open the cassette.
"There was an opening tray in the back, but it didn't occur to them to use it," Appenheimer said.
As odd as Appenheimer's experiences are, they pale in comparison to the time Jerry Moore, a North Carolina-based Diebold service tech, was mistaken for the voice of the Lord while on a service call.
Moore was totally invisible to passersby as he worked on a bank branch machine encased in a large kiosk. As he worked, he heard someone repeatedly inserting her card into the reader. After peering through the slot and seeing an older woman trying to use the machine, Moore said, "Ma'am, the ATM is out of service."
The woman reacted by looking heavenward and saying, "Lord, is that you?"
"You have to remember we're in the Bible belt," Moore said.
Like Appenheimer, Moore has seen his share of miscellania crammed into card readers -- including paper clips, driver's licenses and video store membership cards. His least favorite: a large wad of bubble gum, "probably strawberry," he guessed. "I went through a whole bottle of alcohol on that one. It took me forever to get it cleaned out."
Appenheimer and Moore aren't the only service techs to find there's never a dull moment on the job. Some of their brethren in the technician trade have posted amusing anecdotes on the ATMmarketplace Message Boards. A recent posting, by Charlie G., tells of a customer at a gas station who was convinced the ATM had eaten his card.
One problem: the machine had a dip reader, and thus couldn't have kept the man's card. It took Charlie 30 minutes to convince the man to check his wallet. The man's face, red from yelling, got even redder when he saw the card was in its rightful place in his wallet.
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