Things that suck ass #1: Debit Cards

 A few years ago the world was changed with the introduction of the automatic banking machine (ABM).  Shortly after the world was introduced to the concept of purchasing products directly with their bank accounts...no cash needed. Buck Rogers' style.  What a great concept I thought.  I've always hated having to run to the bank to make sure I had cash to go out and do what ever it is I do.  Paying by Debit has made it so that I don't have to plan ahead when I go shopping, I can just spend as lavishly as I want.  So if while going grocery shopping, I get the hankering for a pair of mink socks, I can just go ape-shit and buy away.  Hooray!

Now, let me state that I do love the convenience of the debit card.  And I do appreciate the safety behind not carrying cash.  I believe that cash will someday be obsolete and replaced by our cards entirely.  I think this is a good thing.  So why do debit cards suck ass?  And how did they suck so much ass that they've made the inaugural session of what can only be a snowball of popularity blog-wise?  Well, it's not the cards nor the concept behind the cards that sucks ass.  It's the PEOPLE behind the debit cards that suck ass.

Now when you hear me say that you might be privy to an image of a morbidly obese gentleman in a wide lapelled navy blue suit with silver pinstripes, sitting in front of a table of empty martini glasses, a plasticized woman on each arm, counting his ill-gotten cash while enjoying a large phallic cigar.  While these people exist, that's not whom I am referring to either.  It's you!  You the people who stand behind the till.  The till that the little yellow sticker is stuck to that says "Just say interac!"  Good plan I think to myself as I pull out my card and hand it to the cashier.  And yes, this is true for EVERY cashier I've EVER met EVER in North America...and I'm referring to the 5 Canadian Provinces, 4 U.S. States and wherever I was in Mexico that I have visited in the past 10 years. It rings the same.  I hand them the card and I just say "Interac". Doesn't matter who it is.  I could have known this cashier for my entire natural life, it could be my own mother, doesn't matter, they would just look at me coldly and say "ON YOUR DEBIT!??"  As if correcting me.  As if trying to train me by speaking loudly and in a superior tone over me in hopes that next time I won't be so foolhardy to actually say "INTERAC" next time.  Sometimes the cashier gives you the eye roll, I hate the eye roll.  I once reminded a cashier of the sign that says "just say Interac" when I received an eye roll.  The cashier scoffed at me and said "yeah, well we call it debit"  Like I have been in a coma for the past 15 years and the world had just passed me by.  I decided to hold an experiment this weekend.  Starting Friday morning and until Sunday evening, I purchased everything with my debit card.  Each time when asked how I was going to pay I just said "Interac" Out of 13 purchases 12 of them corrected me and said "on your DEBIT then?".  The other didn't speak English, but the Korean people have very expressive eyebrows and I am certain she was either undressing me with her eyes, or plotting my murder for embarrassing myself.  Debit cards just set you up to look like an idiot.

So you finally get your cashier your card, you go through the "You're a moron" stage of being corrected...it's not an interac card...it's frikken debit okay!  Now what,...you are handed a little hand-held module dealie and you have to "Swipe the Stripe"  So you swipe.  Cashier smarty pants smirks and remarks "Stripe towards me"  or if you've been stripping towards them all day, this time it'll be "duuhhhh, stripe towards you!  Gawd" Point is; you are NEVER right.  No matter what way you put the god-damned stripe, it's ALWAYS going to be the WRONG FREAKIN WAY!  So, like the sheep that you are, you flip your card, stripe the way god intended and swipe...nothing.  You swipe...nothing.  You swipe again...nothing.  Then what?  The snooty cashier, takes your card and says "here...let me try" As if talking to a small dull child that's trying to tie his shoelaces for the first time.  They run your card to the actual machine that's hooked up and on the first try you get your cue to enter all your numbers etc.  Like the little hand held jobber isn't even connected...they just think you need the freakin' exercise or something.  Why can't the magnetic reader on the cash register be the same thing they have in the hand-held thing-a-ma-bobber?  Because they want you to feel stupid.

I don't know why they're so intent on making us look and feel like we've been inbred for 6 generations.  Interac is a great concept, but why they want their patrons to feel stupid is beyond me.  And before you even try to argue my point you cashiers who are reading this, you know you've been a part of transactions just like this broad generalization on numerous occasions.  Maybe I shouldn't blame you, maybe I should, maybe I should blame Interac and blame debit cards, as debit cards suck ass.

-Tathlyn, The Mirthful Sage.