How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas

Author:Christopher Varelas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

7

Reach Out and Touch Someone

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.

—MAX FRISCH, FROM HOMO FABER

In the mid-1980s, making withdrawals and deposits via ATM was the hot new thing in the world of money. Lines of customers would gather outside the bank at all hours of the day, anxiously waiting their turn. Yet it wasn’t the cutting-edge technology that it seemed to be, as the process basically involved a customer cramming an envelope through a slot on one side of the wall, and then a bank employee fishing that envelope out of a cardboard box on the other side. In fact, it was hardly different from passing your check and slip to a live, in-the-flesh bank teller—except that human contact had been lost.

The tellers hated handling the ATM deposits. Everyone except me. Back at the start of my career, I was only a couple of weeks into the training program at Bank of America, which required newcomers to master each job over a one-year period, and my first post was as a teller in the City of Industry—a thin strip of land just east of Los Angeles, home to thousands of businesses but only about two hundred residents. The other trainees found the task of handling ATM deposits boring and almost offensively menial. But at age twenty-two, in my first job postcollege, there was something I enjoyed about any new experience, no matter how rote.

Each morning before we opened, I would stand beside the head teller as she unlocked the door on the backside of the ATM, and we would wiggle out the deposit box and take it to a table to dump and sort the contents. This gave me the opportunity to sit around the table with the real bank tellers—most of whom were women with families—and talk about their kids and whatever TV shows we’d all watched the night before.

The use of ATMs, for both deposits and withdrawals, required a big leap in trust by customers. I remember the first time I deposited a check of my own into a machine and watched it disappear into the unknown. It felt like I’d fed it into a shredder. I didn’t have much faith that it would survive the journey and actually end up as funds in my account. Without a person to hand it to, a real live teller to look in the eye, my very relationship to the world of money started to feel impersonal and detached.

* * *

Las Vegas in the 1990s attracted the same bizarre clash of cultures and energies as it does today. Tourists in fanny packs or matching neon shirts, showgirls, hustlers, conventioneers, bachelor-party drunkards, magicians, newlyweds, gamblers.

Circa 1996, behold Bozo the Clown holding aloft a scrap of plastic that looks like a credit card. He half turns under the lights and becomes Harvey Weinstein’s doppelgänger. This isn’t a Vegas illusion; this is CES, the massive annual Consumer Electronics Show, and the man at the helm

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