'Help! I'm stuck in this ATM,' writes poor bloke on a scribbled note Police were called to a bank in Corpus Christi, Texas, after a customer getting money out of an ATM was passed a note pleading for help from inside the machine. The contractor working on the cash machine had accidentally locked himself inside the ATM room and realized he had left his phone in his truck. He scribbled notes …
A variation of what we used tell printer users... "There's a little Japanese guy in there who wrights very fast and is very neat. When the machine stops working and we come in, we toss in a 50 pound back of rise and 5 gallons of water for him and sometimes some cookies (biscuits)". I'm not sure if they ever believed us or just assumed we were making a joke.
He got stuck in the ATM ROOM. Simply a room with a door inside of the building that gives access to the back of the ATMs so they can be filled. You still need the right key or bust them open even if you do have access to the back. But it prevents having to fill the machine "out in the open" from the outside where you are an easier target for a stick-up.
They did, and the person had came out. In a non emergency situation the police likely only did so with permiission from the property owner and at least verbal (if not written) agreement the city is not liable for damaging to the door/frame.
Part of why he was there was to fix the room's faulty locks but apparently issue was bad enough even with access to both sides of the door it still came to using a 50 pound battering ram as the key.
In a local seaside town, when I was visiting on work (help in the community), the local bank I use to work at (yeah, this story is going all around the houses now!) had the Cash Delivery Van alarm going off outside.
The alarm had an accompanying message, so the public and/or police could correctly assist. The message was (in an automated robotic voice) "Help, security staff trapped in the van, please send police to assist" repeated over and over.
They had accidentally left the keys in the cab, or let the automatically locking door close behind them. If it was one of the old staff I used to see working there... you would not laugh at them, they always employed big angry looking people!
I know of an incident where someone in a lab made the mistake of writing "help I'm stuck in here" as a joke on the side of a reaction plate being loaded into a sequencer.
Several hours later, a tech from a certain southeast asian country happened to glimpse the writing on the plate in the stacker, and hit the emergency stop. They literally believed in things like gnomes or pixies, and thought there was one caught inside the machine.
In the end no one was disciplined as it was chalked up to cultural or religious differences, but they did send around a memo about writing "confusing" messages on things.
back in the 80's a friend gave me a joke program that did PC speaker audio [uncommon at the time] saying "help I'm stuck inside the computer" etc.. I was taking a C programming class at the time and it 'accidentally' ended up on one of the lab PCs. The instructor mentioned it to me (good guess, heh), trying not to laugh too hard, something about NOT putting things into 'autoexec.bat'... after it had been on there for several days.
25 years ago a director at my company got really freaked out by his week old new car speaking to him for the first time. He actually thought someone was in the car so jumped out and was quite stressed over it and called in to reception at work to say he will be late and explained what had happened.
Overhearing the conversation at reception and the fact I was a young BOFH, I added that "help, i'm stuck inside this computer" to his autoexec.bat within minutes. 30 minutes later I actually heard it from the other side of the building and rushed around to see a completely white CEO backing away further from his room.
Thankfully he took it on the chin and I kept my job!
Is it my imagination or does Google make it difficult to find things that were previously easy to find?
Who remembers - I think it was Olympus - demonstrating how good their cameras were? Someone had taken a monochrome portrait photo in a street in America. Look closely to the top right of the photo and there was a piece of paper stuck to a window. Zooming in on this, it was easy to see a message had been scrawled "Help Me", or similar. The photographer called the police and they found a kidnapped man in the room where the message was shown. Sadly they were too late to save the man.
Certain I didn't imagine the existence of this image, can anyone provide a link? (Guaranteed upvote, or virtual pint as thanks!)
"Is it my imagination or does Google make it difficult to find things that were previously easy to find?"
It's not your imagination. Apparent bit-rot in their indexes started for me about half a dozen years ago,
That, plus websites either dropping off the web, or getting a rewrite without a full migration of data, has definitely changed the experience.
Sorry, can't help with your Olympus tale, though I can attest to how well an Olympus lens can catch details like the one you describe.
In 1967 (or 1968) I wrote my own version of the PDP-8 RIM-format "Binary Loader" program.
When this "binary loader" was run, the ASR33 Teletype printed "HELP LET ME OUT" followed by whatever happened to be in core memory. When the printer carriage reached end of the line, of course the Bell rang. This made it extremely noisy so attracted attention to the printout. Great fun, but our boss Derek had difficulty in finding it amusing!
Copies of the "Binary Loader" tape got distributed to DEC engineers, who DID find it amusing.
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