How Stanbic Bank Stole An Hour Of My Time
I went to withdraw money at a Stanbic Bank ATM at Silverstar Towers on Friday the 1st of February 2013. I arrived at about 4:48pm. I expected a simple transaction to take place.
I put my ATM card in the machine and was surprised to learn that the machine was not issuing any receipts. I refused to make a withdrawal because of the nature of my transaction, so I decided to try the second atm. That machine declined to give me the option to withdraw any cash. I thought there was something wrong with it so I simply ejected my card and decided to try again.
On this attempt, the machine behaved funnily when I tried to insert my card. For fear of it being seized, I decided to remove it and let someone else try to make a withdrawal.
A lady tried after me and was not successful. It was at that point that I instructed the doorman to inform his superiors of the faulty atms.
One lady came and left immediately upon learning about the problem. 6 people came to attempt the same transaction. 5 men and 1 mother who had to go and get her kids but obviously needed the money so that she could not leave without it.
On a Friday afternoon after work, the ATM machines were down. Both machines were down. At the same damn time.
After several complaints to the doorman, a lady came outside to calm us down. She ended up telling one gentleman that the machine wasn’t working for him because he wasn’t doing something right. She accused him of not entering the correct PIN. To his credit, the gentleman did not get upset at this. I responded on his behalf. One gentleman from the company tells us he will inform his colleagues. It was after this that I decided to keep track of all the proceedings. Here is a blow by blow account of what transpired if you’re interested.
The entire point of an ATM card is to have convenient and swift access to your cash at virtually any time of day. What penalty does an institution pay when they fail to keep up their end of the contract? These are the things politicians should be legislating to give power to the powerless.
What bothers me about situations like this is the attitude of the staff. The tendency to deny any responsibility annoys the SHHH out of concerns me. The buck-passing inclination.
What process has been put in place to make sure these machines always have money?
Who is responsible for monitoring the amount of money in the atms? What happens as a punitive measure if he/she fails to do their job?
At least 2 hours of time was lost today - an hour for me and varying amounts for the various people that came and left - all because we assumed that a service we rely on would be reliably provided to us in the usual and reasonable time frame of 1 minute.
Stanbic Bank stole an hour of my time for a reason that is still not clear to me. And I can never get that time back. But I did get an “oh, sorry eh?”, because that fixes everything.