What defines a credit card?
After charging my transportation cards for number of times, I became quite envious of people owning cards with auto-charging features. Basically, those cards are credit cards, which monitors how much money is still left in your card and automatically tops up once it reaches to the certain amount. So despite of the fact I detest owning another credit card, I decided to acquire one.
I received the credit card with excitement, but something really disturbed me. The card, was FLAT. There was no emboss on credit card numbers, and instead, they simply printed the numbers on a card.
It is hard to understand why the design. Some say, credit cards without emboss are a lot safer for overseas traveling. It may as well be a technical issue, perhaps card slots for ticket machines are not designed for an additional millimeter. After all it’s a credit card with Suica features, meaning these cards should go into those machines if you like to use them for, say reserving seats for express trains.
But the fact that they made the card flat, seems like they haven’t really considered the suspicions we could get abroad. I can easily think of several countries where cashiers could simply look at the card (and me) and decline it without even trying it. I recall in China when I tried to use a foreign credit card which did not have PIN codes, the cashier lady resisted to swipe my card. She said, “It’s not safe.”
There was a sufficient number of reasons for her to speculate my credit card. First of all, Chinese credit cards, they come with a 4-digit PIN code. Second, a typical credit card payment there require both the PIN and the signature. While many other countries use the PIN code to reduce the hassle of signing, in China they use this to double the customer’s hassle for the sake of safe transactions. Together with all the papers that I have to deal with between the shopkeeper and the cashier and the queue, it sometimes drove me crazy and took all the shopping fun away.
What happened with the cashier lady and me in the end? She took the card reluctantly after checking my passport, making a call to her manager and me resisting to use anything else. She told me, “Next time set the PIN code because it’s not safe for you!” From the way she looked, she really meant it, she was concerned of me losing money. I keep on thinking, what would she say, if I come to her again and show the new, flat, Suica-integrated credit card? “You! Again!”, perhaps?
