EDITORIAL: Messy ATMs

THERE should be a way to get rid of overflowing paper receipts left scattered around Automated Tellering Machines (ATM) in many banks in the city and around the country.

ATMs are spewing cash and paper receipts 24-hours a day and you can imagine how many of these sheets of paper are spewed out daily. Of course, the cash are kept on the bank cardholders’ pockets while the accompanying paper receipts more often than not are left fluttering on the floor beneath the Automated Tellering Machines because the trash bins provided were already full or that the client is simply shamelessly irresponsible to just throw them around after reading the info he needed from the paper receipt he requested on the ATM.

The piles of paper thrown away soon spill over into the street adding another eyesore to so many other wastes littering our surroundings. One consolation left is that paper is biodegradable (it will decompose later), although it exposes how many of us are so uncaring, dumb, and irresponsible.

Would it be better that ATMs should be commissioned as tool for total paperless transaction (except of course for the cash being withdrawn)? No more receipts to come out of the money robots, but instead the client or cardholder may just simply peruse on the ATM’s screen or monitor the information he needs to know about his account, including his bank balance?

Getting rid of paper in the cash dispensing machines will automatically give us two benefits: first, no more white litters in the front premises of our banks, and second, we spare more trees to be cut for other more important purpose because of the foregone use of paper receipts in these ATMs.

Bicol Mail thinks our banks or those in the ATM industry should consider the suggestion seriously. This will soon have high impact effect, a massive one, if all ATMs all over the country and the world should be rendered totally paperless.

And one more thing: Would our local banks along major streets, which had multiplied like mushrooms in the last few years, especially here in Naga City, would be kind enough to improve their parking spaces to be more car-friendly to their car-owning clients? You see, some of these spaces infront of buildings and establishments where most banks are situated are left unpaved, being open space, because the road contractor would only care for concreting the actual length and bound of the street leaving as unpaved gap the space that actually lies between the street and the building’s frontage. Some private building owners would reluctantly pave the vacant space but usually with a thin coat of cement leaving it to crack in just a few months, if not years, resulting to sharp broken concrete or uneven edges that are, needless to say, harmful to car tires. In fairness, BDO branches have well-concreted frontages for their clients’ cars.

And two more things. Those concrete permanent barriers on parking spaces (to prevent cars from overshooting their space when parking infront of buildings or establishments) should be designed just high enough in order to avoid being nosed off or bumped by the sedan’s low bumper. Meanwhile, the security guards at the Land Bank branch at the Naga rotunda should extend extra effort or one of them be assigned to put order and discipline in the proper parking of their clients’ cars so that no space is wasted and more high blood pressure avoided in that limited parking space infront of the building. They should also see to it that motorcycles are NOT allowed to be parking on the bigger spaces allotted for cars -- and vice versa.