Don't Let the ATM Machine Eat Your Card!

October 19, 2011

So, everything is more complicated when you’re traveling. Case in point is my ATM card.

After the long journey to La Paz, I was finally able to make a call to Charles Schwab with information as to where to send my replacement card. (Unfortunately, while Charles Schwab will accept collect charges for phone calls, phones in Peru and Bolivia evidently are unable to make collect calls, so I’m getting stuck with the charges anyway, and the expenses are adding up.) Anyway, it turns out the bank needed me to fax (not email) certain information to them before they could send the card. If I’d only known how big of a deal this was going to be, I would have pushed the email idea a little harder.

When I returned to the hotel after the phone call, the receptionist told me that I could send a fax from the little post office branch in the same building as our hotel the next day when it was open. The next day came and I went to the post office, but unfortunately, Angelica, the lady who worked there, actually could not send a fax to the US. She was extremely helpful though and called the main post office where they told her I could go to send the fax. She drew me a map and gave me instructions in Spanish as to where to go and what to do. Then, worried that I didn’t fully understand her directions, she went with me to the hotel reception desk to have the instructions repeated to me in English. (For the record, I had understood.J)

A few minutes later I was about to leave on my fax-sending mission when Angelica remembered that the post office would be closed for lunch at that time. She told me to wait for a couple hours until 2:00 and then she would walk down to the post office with me, a very kind offer which I accepted. At 2:00, I went down to the post office branch where she kindly told to me wait for a few minutes. At 2:40 I was ready to go it on my own (the directions weren’t that difficult), but fortunately as I was going to tell Angelica I was leaving she was ready to go.

She guided me to the central post office and then past the main service desks and through a maze of offices and rooms up and down several flights of stairs until we arrived at the office from which she had been told we could send the fax. (At this point I was feeling very glad I hadn't tried to go it on my own--I was a bit surprised they even let me in.)  However, regrettably, we were told we actually couldn't send a fax outside the country on this machine. After a little deliberation among the workers there, the lady in charge of this office joined Angelica and me as we once again climbed some stairs. This new lady briskly led us through several more offices until we arrived at another fax machine, but alas, no out-of-country calls on this one either. A new woman from this office then joined the three of us already on the fax-sending mission, and we marched on through several more offices until we reached the very-important looking office of a man evidently in charge of something important. After hearing our story he let us pass through to one more fax machine in a behind the scenes office, but we encountered the same problem.

At this point, after a little discussion amongst the office workers, I was instructed to sit with the man-in-charge-of-something-important while the fax-sending team, now up to six, moved a fax machine from one room to another to connect it with an international line. I sat with the man-in-charge-of-something-important who kindly tried to make conversation with me in my broken Spanish while the team worked on the fax. Every few minutes we were interrupted with an update. Eventually they got to what seemed very close to sending the fax, but the number wasn’t going through.

There are various codes that need to be attached to a phone number when making an international call—both numbers need to dial outside of a country and a code needed to reach a particular country. Unfortunately, none of us was very versed in these codes, so we were trying various permutations of 0s and 1s trying to reach the US.

After several tries, the team decided the number I gave them must have been wrong, and the man-in-charge-of-something-important made a call to information to check on the area code while the others went back out of the room try other options. We knew the office we were calling was in Denver, the area code of which the man-in-charge-of-something-important confidently discovered was 303. The number I had written down was 720.

Now, I knew I hadn’t accidently written down 720 when the man from the bank had told me 303. I was so grateful to everyone’s help and kindness, however, that I couldn’t quite figure out how to respectfully explain in my broken Spanish that sometimes there is more than one area code to a city in the US, and that I had taken down the fax number very carefully and even repeated it back to the man in Denver from Charles Schwab, so I was quite confident it was correct. (I think sometimes when you don’t speak a language very well native speakers of that language assume you’re not particularly smart in other ways as well. This may have been the case with man-in-charge-of-something-important, as he dismissed my contributions to the problem-solving-process and was convinced he had unraveled our dialing problem with the 303 discovery.)

Well, after multiple tries with various number arrangements and still no luck (and no way to make an international call to Charles Schwab from the bank—collect or otherwise), the fax-sending team was sent back to the original office Angelica and I tried at the post office. After several more unsuccessful attempts from the fax machine there, the post-office team gave up and suggested I use the call center down the street. (Why this wasn’t the original suggestion, I don’t know.)

Angelica took me to the center and helped me navigate through several different lines until we found the place where I could send an international fax. We were getting close! We gave the letter and the number to the call center employee to send the fax. He knew how to call outside of Bolivia, and from the initial sounds of it, the fax was going to go through…And then, it didn’t. The phone rang, the fax machine answered and made its little high-pitched squeal, but the paper didn’t go move. We tried again and the same thing happened.

Fortunately, there were ways to make international calls from this call center, so, I moved to the phone booth to have another non-collect phone conversation with Charles Schwab. Always helpful, the bank quickly transferred me to someone who could help me with my problem. It turns out the number we had been dialing was indeed correct, but they also gave me an alternative number to try.

Four hours, 10 people, and multiple machines after my fax-sending journey began that morning, the fax went through to Charles Schwab!

While this ATM experience has been frustrating (and it may not be over—we're actually skipping our visit to the city where my card was sent because the roads are closed due to protests), it has also reaffirmed my faith in the kindness of people. How nice is it to know there are people in this world like Angelica who will sacrifice an afternoon to help a stranger!