ATM Card

For a couple of days my ATM card has been acting up. Specifically, it has declined to work with any ATMs that are not of its own branch, as well as the ATM-cash registers in shops.

So today I went to my bank to complain, and ran into a problem that never fails to get me railed up: I knew more the matter on hand than the nice girl of customer support. It was very nice of her to tell me to try and clean the magnetic stripe on my card. Unfortunately I

• would have thought of that myself - it is not often that I instead apply a layer of grease to see whether it will ameliorate the transaction
• know that the magnetic stripes on the cards are not used anymore, haven't been for years. At least in Europe, everything works via the embedded chip.

I cautiously asked her if there might be some other reason for the problem, maybe in the computer system. She smiled brightly, and told me all she could do was get me a new card. Which costs me a hundred CHF. I hemmed and hawed for a while, but then gave in. The new card will arrive next week - we will see if it works.