Who, Me? Welcome to another edition of “Who Me?”, The Register’s Monday column that shares your mistakes and celebrates your escapes.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Phil” who once had a job maintaining automatic teller machines (ATMs).
This story starts with routine maintenance of an ATM at a bank branch. “I solved the issue quite easily and quickly,” Phil told us.
Banks are very serious operations so even though this job was simple, Phil had a lot of paperwork to do before his work was formally done.
“First I had to call my dispatcher, who gave me a code to list on paperwork,” he explained. Next, he had to find a bank clerk to sign off a form. In case the clerk wanted to inspect his work, Phil usually kept the keys to the branch’s ATM at hand, alongside the big bunch of master keys he used to gain access to the various models he maintained.
On this occasion, the clerk was satisfied, signed the form, so Phil completed the requisite forms, scooped up his tools and keys, and headed to his next job.
At his next job, Phil pulled out some keys, tried them in the resident ATM, and was surprised when none of them worked. He therefore looked in his toolbox, and saw more keys.
“Then it hit me,” he told Who, Me? “I kept the keys from the bank branch I just visited.”
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Phil immediately called his dispatcher and confessed.
“A couple of minut