kartooner

A co-worker of mine (we’ll call him Tod) relayed a thought of his deal­ing with a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion that he’s had to cope with in the past. He men­tioned that when­ever he uses an ATM some­times he’ll find a bal­ance receipt hang­ing from the slot, the result of some­one walk­ing away with­out first either:

• Tak­ing their bal­ance receipt and stuff­ing it into their pock­ets, or simply
• Crum­bling the receipt into a ball and shoot­ing a free throw into the trash.

His first instinct is to look at the receipt. Upon doing this you are given a glimpse into another per­sons bank account and some­times depend­ing on the sit­u­a­tion this will either make you look supe­rior or infe­rior (men­tal note: don’t look at receipt if the fel­low rides up in a Fer­rari) in regards to your finan­cial predicament.

He says his wife gets after him for doing this — I’m assum­ing because of pri­vacy issues — and scolds him for look­ing at the bal­ance of a stranger’s account. Yet, this seems super­flu­ous to me con­sid­er­ing the receipt doesn’t show the name of the account holder. Rather a typ­i­cal ATM receipt only shows the last four dig­its o f the account, the trans­ac­tion activ­ity (be it a with­drawal, deposit or both) and the end­ing balance.

To be hon­est, I too am at fault for doing this. It’s an imme­di­ate reac­tion to look, sim­i­lar to our instinct to pry into other people’s lives at times. Just the other day I found a receipt show­ing an end­ing bal­ance of $105.00. Was it nec­es­sary that I pick up the paper lying just beneath the slot? Not really.

How­ever, it makes for a good obser­va­tion and the great­est mate­r­ial for writ­ing and com­edy rou­tines comes from real­ity — from real life sit­u­a­tions and occurences (not includ­ing “scripted” real­ity television).