Puffy Eyes, an Errant Automatic Teller Thingammajig!

These things, these damn things upset me. Have I been cribbing too much? Indulge me. Please.

Ronnie’s down with an eye infection and the poor guy can’t see from one eye. And what’s more, his exams are next month. So I took him, one-eyed and all, to the hospital in Vashi, which has been done up in marble and glass into something of a modernistic office complex, which is not what it’s meant to be, I guess. Leave it. I know poor chap is suffering the way his left eye is swollen up and watering all the time. His eye has been reduced to a gash and I have to prise it open with both hands to have a look to see how bad it is.

So I took the day off to take him to the only good hospital I know in New Bombay. But before that I went to the ATM to withdraw some cash. I didn’t have sufficient cash and God knows what they would require me to do at the hospital. Suppose they tell me the eye has to be operated immediately or he would lose his vision. Heaven forbid that. What happened there is bizarre, I tell you. To my dismay I tried several times and after a lot of whirring, clicking, ticking, tocking, and all that, still it wouldn’t moan (You see, it makes a kind of moaning noise before it gives you cash, guess it is very sad about giving out cash to its rightful owners, such as me!) a bit and spit my money out at me. I was growing impatient by the second. I wondered what to do as it was an emergency and the poor guy would miss his exams if his eye went bad.

So, dithering, I go from one HDFC bank ATM to another and still no success. Irony is this bank has my paycheque in full for the past few months. Ultimately I decide to go it with whatever cash I have. And the visit to the hospital proved smooth, and the doctor reassuring, “only an insect bite” she assured me, “will go away in two days.” She prescribed some medicine and I get back home and I am sitting here. And when I open my email box what I saw made me freeze. It said “your account has been debited for Rs 10,000 today.” That gave me a nasty shock and when I frantically phoned the bank I was told, it was credited back to my account as the transaction wasn’t carried out.

That's when I lost it completely. “Then,” I screamed, “why didn’t it show that it was credited back?”