Letter: A silly mistake

EDITOR,
Recently, I made a very silly mistake. I used the coin-counting machine at the Scotts Valley branch of Bay Federal Credit Union. My mistake was to assume that because the machine asked me for my Bay Federal Credit Union account number, the money was going into my account. After putting over $100 into the machine, I took the receipt home and shredded the receipt. It wasn’t until the following week, when I took in even more money and the teller had to open the machine up to change coin bags, that I read the sign above the machine which indicated that I needed to show my receipt to the teller.
Thank goodness I didn’t deposit that $209 into Bay Fed’s Christmas fund.
I phoned and talked to a very nice person at the bank who tried to help me but, after many days, called back to inform me that Bay Federal, a financial institution, whose business it is to keep track of every fraction of a penny, had no way to know if I actually did donate over $100 to its coin-counting machine.
There are two types of people who use Bay Fed’s coin machines: account-holders and non-account-holders. The irony is that because Bay Fed has its machines ask for an account number, it is only its very own customers who might make the mistake I made.
My money is gone. I hope others may learn from my mistake.
Ed James-Beckham, Ben Lomond