Getting Money Out Of An ATM Is Now Officially A Crap-Shoot

By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - According to Caterina Duarte, the Marketing Manager for Telered S.A, the company responsible for connecting banks through ATM machines, there are still some problems with an "upgrade" to software deployed yesterday. The company made what she called a "unilateral business decision" to start charging a $3.00 transaction fee for all international transactions. However, she also specified that those fees will not apply to any European accounts. At this moment she said some of the machines are working while some others have not yet been fixed. Apparently the problem has to do with the software that manages the ATM transaction, and they did deploy a fix this morning at 8:30 that corrected the problem on some machines but not all of them. She could not tell me how an individual user might be able to determine (just by looking at it) if any particular machine might work or not, and her advice was to "just try it, and if it's not going to work then you'll get an error message." Duh. She said the are working around the clock to fix the problem, that they are aware of it, and she would send me an email once it has been resolved. When I started pressing her on the "what the hell" issues of charging the $3.00 bucks a pop for every transaction, she said she would be sending me some information they sent to the banks weeks ago. I can't wait. Anyway, in the meantime, you're going to have to try several ATM machines in order to find one that works until they get this cluster un-screwed. What a goat-rope...

Copyright 2009 by Don Winner for Panama-Guide.com. Go ahead and use whatever you like as long as you credit the source. Salud.