After putting my cash card into a Nationwide ATM in the West End nothing appeared to be happening. ‘Relax, this has happened before. Some machines just take ages to register the card.’ I told myself.

Unfortunately, after ten to fifteen seconds still nothing… then a machine unusable message appeared. Not long after that a Microsoft Windows dialog box popped up, ‘Shutting Down.’ Shutting down?! Give me my &%$ing card back first!

It was Windows NT as it turned out. I watched as the machine actually rebooted itself and went through POST. A WinNT log dump then started. Finally the ATM software restarted and I hoped for the best. It was still unusable!

A sticker on the machine said something like, ‘No staff at this station have access to this machine. Call x for customer service if necessary.’ At that point I wondered whether it might be a hoax number and a machine which had been tampered with - paranoid, but you never know.

I got the phone number of Nationwide and that of my own bank, currently Alliance & Leicester. Nationwide told me that they’d sort out the machine in the morning and any non-Nationwide cards found would be destroyed and that I’d need to cancel and order a replacement card with my own bank.

The Alliance & Leicester number for reporting stolen and lost cards proved the most frustrating experience, however. You have to enter your customer ID and pin before you can speak to an advisor. Being in the West end, I didn’t have my customer ID and just wanted to speak to someone to confirm my identity and get the card cancelled. Is that too much to ask for?

So in the end I got my card cancelled and just pray that it didn’t pop out of the machine after I’d left - when I past it on the way home it had started working again! A station attendant assured me that any cards would drop inside the machine if there was a problem and I can only hope he is right.

Now I have to wait up to 10 business days to receive my new card and have easy access to my bank account. What a hassle!