DATE TIME MACHINE
I unwittingly left my bank card in this ATM. I came back just minutes later and the card was gone, though I could see that no one after me had entered the building which housed the ATM.
This ATM machine was of the older style, in which the inserted bank card fully enters the machine. Machines like this are evidently programmed to ingest the bank card when it sits in the card slot for too long. This is a weird form of automated security, but I guess I should be glad to know that no one had an opportunity to steal the card I absent-mindedly left behind.
I did not much appreciate that, and was in fact surprised to find that banks still use ATMs that fully inhale bank cards. This needless feature creates an unnecessary point of failure, and is reminiscent of businesses which print customers’ full credit card numbers on receipts, or which confiscate customers’ belongings at the baggage check before allowing entry to the premises. I guess you could say that the fully-ingested bank card at this ATM was in a similar spirit as baggage check at retail stores, a confiscatory policy which seems less common these days.
