First off, I'm really sorry that you're going to have a bad Monday morning. I'm sure there's some procedure for recovering or resetting a password on whatever brand of ATM that you have there, so things won't be too bad for you. I promise that I didn't mess with anything but the password. I'm not cruel or vindictive, I just wanted some beer money. You have to understand, however, that it's really your own fault, anyway.

When the printer cable fails or gets disconnected from the printer in the ATM, the machine should page someone -- it's connected to a network, for crying out loud, and it can do that sort of thing. It shouldn't sit there saying "Printer cable attachment failure" with an option to go into admin mode. People tend to stick their card into an ATM before they read the screen, especially if the screen in question looks like it has a normal "Welcome" message and side-button options. God forbid someone get it stuck in there. I consider myself lucky I saw the screen before I tried. And it really shouldn't say any of these things when it's the only ATM in a 4 block radius from the cash-only bar my friends were at.

Really, the machine should display something like "Out of Order" in a big flashing font. Or it should shut down completely. It shouldn't taunt users with the fake promise of twenty bucks. It definitely should not taunt chronic button-pushers like me with words like "admin mode". Some things should never be done.

In spite of your hardware failure (and lack of response to same), we got a couple drinks no sweat; everyone understands that these things come up. But your error message (or lack thereof) annoyed me. Apparently it annoyed someone else, since your machine had been out of order long enough for grafitti to be written on it saying that it was busted. I don't know how long it takes a non-working ATM to be vandalized before the punks with sharpies get uppity, but it was that grafitti which caught my eye as I was leaving the pub and walking past the annoying ATM again. I'm not sure how I first missed the message the miscreants left, but they were more helpful than you guys seem to have been.

Having said all this, you guys need to either:

1. Pick better admin passwords
2. Change the lame default admin passwords

Otherwise, some annoyed person with a couple beers in him will be walking past the machine which failed him an hour earlier and he will find your lame password, and then he will poke around in the admin menus until he sees the "" option. At that point, a bad day for you (whenever you do decide to fix your ATM) is an eventuality. It's just not my fault, see. Those sorts of menu options are like crack for some people.

Anyway, I'm sorry if I made your life temporarily difficult -- I've never had root on an ATM, and it was too much fun to resist. But you try harder to keep your ATMs working, and I'll try harder to push fewer buttons, OK?

Signed,
        Wee

P.S. No, I will not tell you what the password was changed to -- you'll just have to guess. But here's a hint: if you were texting someone with those 5 numbers, you'd be able to use the letters "f", "u", "c", and "k". You might even be able to re-use a letter...