Cash-dispensing teller machines were also knocked out, so people who did not have cash on hand could not buy flashlights, batteries or other supplies.
Instead, some employees stand at "teller towers", dispensing advice or leading customers to colleagues who can help them with a loan or a mortgage.
This morning, Aurora Melgar showed up at a branch of Banco Francés after hearing that the automated tellers there were dispensing money.
In the section about "great British inventions of the 20th century" it states: "In the 1960s, James Goodfellow (1937-) invented the cash-dispensing automatic teller machine (ATM) or 'cashpoint'".
Automated machines have, however, quietly slipped into many corners of everyday life.Far more prevalent than robot vacuum cleaners are copiers that collate, staple and stack your documents and automated-teller machines that, as their name suggests, save human bank tellers the trouble of dispensing cash.
Fortis, one of Belgium's biggest banks, said on Friday that many of its automated tellers would not be dispensing euros until Wednesday.
Fearful of running out of money now that banks and automatic tellers are no longer dispensing cash, anxious consumers were limiting their purchases to food, medicine, gasoline and a few other essential items.
Luck Rakanithes, a fortune teller who started out two decades ago dispensing horoscopes the old-fashioned way (face-to-face in a corner of an obscure Bangkok hotel) now runs a call center with a room full of fortune tellers sitting in cubicles and wearing headsets as if they were selling credit cards or offering tech support.
Each year, he presides over the bank's "Wow!" awards, dispensing prizes to employees for the best part-time teller and other categories.
On Jan . 1 if all goes as planned, automated bank tellers in 12 European countries will start dispensing crisp new euros and stop issuing national currencies like the Spanish peseta, German mark, French franc and Dutch guilder.
The country's moment of truth may have been in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, when, as Yoichi Funabashi, the international affairs commentator of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, wrote, "Japan found itself merely an automatic teller machine, one that needed a kick before dispensing the cash".
