Bad ATM Wednesday April 10 2013

I went to withdraw N1000 from one of my account that has only N1800. As a matter of fact the only money I have now. The unexpected happened. I went to a Zenith Bank atm machine, I have a Gtbank atm card. The took way too long to process. I kept staring at the message ''Transaction in Progress'' and the blinking ''please wait'' message till my eyes soured. I was a bit impatient I guess. I haven’t experienced such before. I breezed in the bank to company. The guy I met was like scolding me for coming to complain instead of waiting for the transaction to complete. I saw it as malfunction or something, I never experienced such long delay before. The guy said network could be bad that’s why its taking eternity to process.

As I was heading back sms alert of the transaction hit my phone. My heart sank. I reached the atm and someone was already using it. I told him I left a transaction there, he said he didn’t see anything. Now don’t panic. Worst case scenario my atm card is gone too. The cash is a forgone conclusion. The guy I met was checking his balance and I saw it was N123. I thought to myself someone who has only N123 in his account won't mind picking N1000 that dropped in his lap. Then I could be wrong. Could it be the atm retracted the cash? I highly doubt it. Anybody walking past the atm machine can easily pick the cash. I went back in the bank to get my card assuming the atm machine retracted it. It took a while before the bank resolved the issue.

At this point I don’t have a dime on me no pun intended. My boss asked me to meet him at Radisson Blu Hotel, I took a cab to the hotel. The cabman waited outside while I went in collected the cab fare from my boss. I went to the bank to cash a cheque then to Shoprite and finally back to the office. Considerable time was spent to accomplish all this. Late in the evening when I wanted to go home, my boss called again asking me to bring some items to him somewhere in Victoria Island.

I was not happy about it cuz what he asked me to do can EASILY be done by the driver. If the driver thought the same, it was just a waste of my time, I was even about leaving for the day. I went after all. He gave me a grand for transport, I guess that covers the one grand I lost. I went home after a few delays at the bus stop.