Dream Diary: European ATM Edition

So I'm apparently in Serbia for some unknown reason, and am with at least one guy who was in my lab at school. I realize I need to get some money, but that all I have is the Canadian money I had in my pocket.

So I go up to this giant bank machine, that looks like an arcade case, only huge. I have to stand on my tiptoes to read anything on the screen. I slide in my card and it asks me to put in my money to get it converted to Euros. So I started hunting through my pockets to find all the money I can, and mostly it's Canadian change. I put the loonies and toonie and quarters into the machine's coin slot, sometimes it gets stuck, sometimes I have to hammer them in. As I am putting in the coins, their value in Euros is displayed on the screen, and it is dismally small compared to the value in Canadian dollars that I had put in there.

The User Interface of the ATM was pretty awful as well. Everything was orange, and reminded me a lot of the website http://www.therandirhodesshow.com/ (even though I've only visited there a couple of times.) Orange is, in my mind, the prototypical 'bad' user interface colour, perhaps because it is opposite from blue on the colour wheel (when talking about light, not pigment). On the other hand, the orange was attention grabbing and urgent, where blue is sleep-inducing.

Speaking of attention grabbing, as I was desperately searching for Canadian coins in my pockets throwing away the papers and other random crap I had in my pocket today in real life (how's that for your brain tricking you into believing your dreams are real?), I look back up at the ATM and it says "session expired" and my money is gone. Or maybe not, but there's some long procedure to go through to exit the transaction and get your money back.

The other thing I noticed about the ATM machine was that it looked like an ancient box, but the UI on it was very modern looking, if not any good. Which I guess is my conception of Europe in general, where everything looks old and crumbly on the outside, but underneath is brand new technology. But at the same time, there's still something fundamentally screwed up about it all that makes it just as unhelpful somehow.
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