A loud, thunderous boom rips through the desolate halls of the campus center lobby. No there was not a dance going on, nor a band playing some loud music, just another frustrated user of the ATM machine on campus. “Of course I’m going to kick it, it doesn’t work” says Castleton student Stephen Shaw, after recently blasting the machine below the belt. “Now I have to walk all the way down to the bank ATM, this sucks!”

But those days are now gone.

Castleton State College students have been plagued by the self-serving ATM machine for the last two years. Finally, someone did something about it.

The ATM was replaced two weeks ago because apparently the school’s staff simply had enough with it.

“We buried the old one,” said a laughing Judith Carruthers, director of Career Development at the college, when asked about the fate of the old machine

Apparently, that ATM machine was a fine piece of equipment up until about two years ago, Carruthers said. The school made numerous attempts to fix the machine, but soon after someone from the company came to fix it, it would just go haywire again.

“It was just overused and out of juice,” Carruthers said.

Finally, after numerous phone calls, The ATM big boys decided to give the school a brand new machine.

An independent study prior to its replacement showed that on average eight out of 10 would-be ATM users got the massage “ATM is offline, please try again later” as if to mock in their effort to get $20 for a pizza.

Dennis Proulx, director of Residence Life on campus, explained that the ATM and all of the vending machines on campus are governed by outside private companies and that the school contracts with the companies to keep them in working order.

The school does not receive any money from these machines, he said.

So with the college out of the equation, students were at a loss as to how to get working machines on campus. One suggested getting tough with the companies to spawn action.

“We need to, like, do a mass petition to send awareness or something,” student Jason Luce said, adding that if the companies got an earful from the masses, they will get weak at the knees and comply with the request.

As fate would have it, however, no petition was needed and students are now able to grab cash in the student center with ease.

But some students, still smarting from months of inability to get cash from the old machine, are leery about the new machine too and are waiting for it to start spitting out messages instead of cash.

“If this one doesn’t work, I’m gonna kick it twice,” student Stephen Shaw said.