ATM

When I was a kid, every now and then I would see the University of Texas A&M's football team playing a game on a Saturday. I would look at them and wonder why they had ATM on the side of their helmets.

ATM, I knew, stands for Automatic Teller Machine. That's where my parents would go to grab some cash when they needed it for something. It was confusing how it worked for their logo. I realized that what they had still worked, but it was just more confusing than it should be. 

They probably would have been better off just going with something else, like a picture...except their team was the Aggies. What the hell do you use to represent an Aggie? A dude in overalls? Although, as bad of an idea as that sounds, Nebraska actually has that logo already.

I guess, maybe they could have a bull or something like that...except that it is pretty much the same as the college just up the street in Austin.

So, there's no way they're doing that.

I guess the only change they might have gone with that could have made it better would be to make the A&M smaller and put it beneath the T. Instead, we get the ATM look.

Now, it suddenly means more than it did when I was a kid in Sacramento. In those days, I had no connection whatsoever to that school. Now, it's the closest major institution to where I live, unless you count the University of Houston, which is pretty big too. I see Texas A&M stuff all the time. People are wearing shirts and hats, they put up flags, the whole works.

The other day, I saw a sticker on a car that actually makes it all come full circle, though. This one:

It's one of those stickers where you proclaim how proud you are of your student that you have at a certain university. This guy is some student's dad. I saw that, and my memories of the ATM logo came flooding back, and I couldn't help but laugh. When you have a kid in college these days, you tend to be paying one hell of a lot of money for that privilege. Thanks to poor decisions by our government, college tuition has risen twice as fast as inflation in the last twenty years, and there's nobody who needs money more than a college student. So, that sticker is appropriate for either interpretation of the logo. Yeah, he is the dad of a Texas A&M student, but I bet he also feels just like an ATM dad.