The other night, I had to go to the bank to deposit a $66 check (sadly, nothing to do with getting my money back from the IRS) and withdraw my usual $60 “fast cash.”  In this neck of the woods, most of my bank’s ATM’s are drive-up, which sucks in my Saturn.  I have to position the car close enough to the wall so that I can reach the buttons of the ATM, but not so close that I ram it into the cement barriers that proudly display the war wounds of many an errant vehicle.  I think these drive ups are made for the SUV crowd, because using them makes me feel like a kid reaching for candy from the top of the fridge.

I went through the rigmarole of swiping my card, pressing the button for English (which is on the top left, damn it), entering my PIN, selecting “deposit” and requesting an envelope.  While I was stuffing the envelope with my wee check, I noticed a shady character in my rear view mirror.  He was scrawny and had a long beard with no mustache, which meant that he was either Amish, a Vassar Student, or a deranged serial ATM killer who was taking revenge on the world to compensate for his inability to grow hair on his upper lip.  I weighed my options as I deposited the check.

If he’s Amish, then it would make sense that he has no car, but why is he using the ATM, and since when are there Amish people in the Hudson Valley?  Maybe he’s a kid on Rumspringa, and perhaps he’s going to rob me once I withdraw the $60 just so he can get a taste of the badass life.  It would make sense if he was a kid from Vassar, since at that time, I was using the bank two blocks away from the college.  But those kids never leave that campus, so the fact that he was on foot at the drive-up ATM was frightening.  What drove him off?  Could be that there was some kind of incident at the college, and he was the lone survivor, looking for $60?  And since I know someone who was once robbed at gunpoint at a drive-up ATM (a story that made me feel very self-righteous to be a car-less New Yorker at the time) I figured that there was a good chance he was a robber, even though he wasn’t a very good one because he gave me lots of time to get a good look at his face.

Whoever he was, I became pretty damn convinced that he was meaning to do harm, so I declined to withdraw the money, lest he make his move upon seeing the cold hard cash.  I put the car into drive, looking in my rear-view mirror the whole time.  I got a few feet away, and he walked up to the ATM and started making a transaction.  I felt pretty stupid for thinking him someone sinister.  But then I felt mad that he was walking through the drive-up ATM when there is a perfectly good regular ATM 10 miles away, and if he had just walked there, he would have gotten some exercise and not scared me out of my withdrawal. In hindsight, I should have waited for him to get his cash, reversed my car, hit him, and stolen his money.  But a little voice in my head convinced me not to, and I guess that’s what 20 years of Sunday School will get you.