Some years ago, when banks started putting in machines, my favourite bank teller, Mrs. Roberta, said to me, "Why don't you shift over to a machine?" I replied that they was designed to replace people like her, and so tellers were being asked to persuade customers to replace themselves, and she said, "Well that's true, but I am retiring in a few weeks anyway." "I'll tell you what, Mrs. Roberta, the day you retire, I'll shift." On her last day, she showed me how to work one of the machines, and the manager came over, and we had a good talk about technology and Mrs. Roberta, of convenience vs. human services, etc.
Since then, whenever I go inside the bank, the manager (who is leaving next week) and I chat about the machines. He told me that they often get crazy letters deposited, that people are constantly misentering how much money they were depositing in checks ("Almost always too much, almost never too little") and so on. Yesterday we got on to behaviour and etiquette. My mother, for instance, will not deposit any large sums of money in an outdoor machine -- she feels that it should be done under a roof.
Another interesting thing is that our branch is right beside the Salvation Army mission, and there are often lines of customers for the outdoor machines, and lines for the bread interlacing. Beggars follow the rules very carefully, even when hopelessly drunk. I mean, here you have a machine, spitting out money, and I have never had a beggar ask me for money while I am in the line or at the window. They obey the unspoken rule that even in the pouring rain, we are in a private room -- perhaps they have tried breaking into this "Cone of Cash" privacy once or twice (they certainly sleep in the indoor machine lobby), but the horrified reaction probably stopped them after that. Maybe this is just Canada, but I doubt it -- the handling of money, even at an open air machine that rubs the fact that other people have money so obviously in one's face, is so intimate; and yet, it is happening out in the open air. A labour friend of mine likens it to the old paydays at factories at the turn of the century: but I am not sure it is like anything else, just a wierd new habit that everyone now takes for granted.