My daughters best friend works as head teller in a bank in east Tennessee.The last couple of days it was total confusion with the ATM.She said it was not giving the cards back among other problems. When she called to report it she was told a chip installed for the year 2000 malfunctioned & they have to remove it.This particular bank has several branches locally...just wondering if they were all having that problem.She was on the cell phone when she was telling me about the incident & there was a lot of static.Tomorrow I'll see her & find out the details. For weeks she had been telling me her bank was ready for the year 2000...now she doesn't know what to think. Also,they have had a lot more people withdrawing their money lately, mostly elderly people....maybe a lot of GI's in Tennessee!

-- Raven (Raven@deepwoods.com), February 13, 1999

Answers

My bank has had way too much ATM "offline" time in the last month or so.

Those "elderly" people are the ones old enough to have memories of the depression, I bet. Try telling them we've tamed the business cycle!

E.

-- E. Coli (nunayo@beeswax.com), February 13, 1999.

I think the folks that aren't having trouble at their ATM's are probably the ones most at risk...it probably indicates that their bank has not gotten to the testing stage yet.

-- a (a@a.a), February 13, 1999.

If my bank's ATMs are down 75% of the time in y2k, do you realize what that'll mean? It'll mean they will have improved their performance by about 10%.

-- Puddintame (dit@dot.com), February 13, 1999.

ran into my first instance of this with one of those generic atms at the 7-11 today - wouldn't take my credit card with the 09/00 expiration date...when I attempted to speak with the manager his response was "oh well, it's been doing that off and on a lot lately...".

-- Arlin H. Adams (ahadams@ix.netcom.com), February 14, 1999.

Lots of problems with ATMs over the last month here in Philadelphia. One set of them was tripling entrys for awhile! Many are intermittently down (no real pattern I know of).

-- RD. ->H (drherr@erols.com), February 14, 1999.

About 2 months ago my bank double debited and double credit accounts for transaction made on the 31st. If you deposited money on the 31st, it double the deposit. If you withdrew cash from your ATM, it double the amount withdrawn! We got an apology letter, they blamed it on a computer glitch! After that incident, I quit using my ATM card and did all transactions inside the bank. I think we'll be seeing more and more of these types of incidences as time goes on. Better cut up those cards and use cash only.

-- bardou (bardou@baloney.com), February 14, 1999.

Remember that $6k that disapeared from my account into cyber-blackhole? They credited it a week later..., then again a few days later. Made for a nice fat checking account for a few days. They did correct the mistake within a couple days though. Amazing how fast they track THEIR money, but much slower with ours.

-- Chris (catsy@pond.com), February 14, 1999.

bardou,

If your bank was saying that the double-crediting and -debiting on that past date applied to all customers, then it was almost certainly not Y2k-related.

For 11 years I worked for a supplier of financial services software, and ran thousands of ATM test transactions.

Doubling all transactions on a particular date can simply be due to mistakenly running the settlement for that date twice. I've seen it happen several times -- not Y2k-related.

-- No Spam Please (anon@ymous.com), February 15, 1999.