Those of you who go to cash machines to take money out and actually put the money into your wallet/purse/pocket every time, you may not be aware that cash machines take money back if you don’t lift it after a certain amount of time. I’m not sure if US cash machines do this but here in the UK ours do. I’m not sure what can be on your mind to make you forget that after you just pressed seven buttons, within five seconds, for £200 to not lift it but in my job I meet a lot of these sorts of dumbasses.

We have a cash machine outside of our shop with a security camera which looks towards the machine side on. Every month we get a few people saying they forgot to lift their money and if we could check the cameras to see if anyone lifted it or if it may have been sucked back in. I think machines usually wait between 10-15 seconds before it takes the money back.

As most of my work days involve me standing behind a till and serving customers, I am starting to think there should be a set amount of time that a customer should make me stand there holding their change out like a dick before they take it.

Little old women are the worst. I had a female customer, in her mid-30s, who came into the shop just yesterday (Friday, 20th January 2012) and said “you men have the right thinking.” I was going to propose a number of topics for a joke but she wasn’t a regular, so I kept it clean. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Putting change in your pockets rather than a wallet, or in my case a purse. It takes too long to go through a bag for just a couple of coins for a [news]paper.” It’s not just the quickness and ease, in most cases, and it is always old women, they wait until everything is fully bagged and a queue is building up before they start rummaging through their silver collection, counting up their five pence coins for a bill of over eight quid. They know it is going to be over a certain amount so instead of being prepared they stare into space and wait until you inform them of the cost of their shopping. Then they will place their handbag down, rummage for their purse to then spend 10 seconds trying to remember which side has their coins and which side their notes (they always get it wrong and then joke about they’ve had the purse for years) and then start counting. At this point I have a queue of five or more people; every so often you see a head pop out from the line to look and see what the old duffer is doing. It could be made easier if I worked with people who helped me out (on Fridays I do but on Saturday and Sunday I’m better on my own, for your sake) but one of the guys I work with at the weekend is more useless than a feather in a gun fight. He constantly walks around staring at his ugly mug in the mirror, fixing his shaved hair and singing Pakistani songs. It’s always amusing when my boss, a Pakistani, is around as he hates it and you will often hear him shouting “if you don’t stop singing that Paki shite I’ll boot you in the nuts!”

It came to me on Friday, soon after speaking to that woman in her mid-30s, that maybe I should start taking money back. I stand there with my arm out, waiting, eternally waiting for this old duffer to sort herself out so she can finally take her change and I can give my arm a few seconds of a rest before I need to serve another customer. So I’m now proposing a 5-10 second rule on all of my customers. During those 5-10 seconds if you do not accept your change it will return to the till, that is of course, until you lodge a complaint with my manager and I then give you it back.

To highlight how effective/profitable this mentality would be, I put it to the test. For one hour in work today I started to count every time I was ready to drop the customers change in their hands. Over that hour, which included a sprint to the toilet for a pish, I had thirteen customers who made me wait five seconds or more before taking their change. I must add to this, all customers have seen my hands or have heard me say “here’s your change,” they know I am giving them their change but find a way to delay the process. Over that one hour period £36.81 was just left there, floating around for five seconds or more as the customer decided what planet they were on. I actually wrote down all the numbers on the back of my wage packet.

It will never become a thing that we all do, mainly because a bank will restore that money into your account while I will be pocketing it for either the shop or my own gain. I guess the problem actually comes down to the fact that I’m too fast on a till and then I just run into a brick wall that is a wee dotty old bat and the occasional guy who from on is known as buddy. Maybe I should force my boss into changing the layout of the till area so the bags are at the side of the customers and they have to pack their shopping themselves. Saves me the hassle and I’ll be happy to wait as you try split everything up for an even weight.