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August 29, 2005

Plastic Bags

I guess I work over one credit card in particular when I go shopping and what not. After time, I go to the supermarket and am asked to slide my card and it doesn't work. Grocery stores are fond of telling me that if I put a bag on my card that it will work. It's a strange bit of tewari and Reverse that I thought would make an interesting blog.

It's not the bag that does the magic. While the bag does perform an important function for a nearly stripped card, the real issue is one of distance.

Most of us, when something doesn't work, try to do things more, when we should do things less. If a foreigner doesn't speak our language, we should talk louder. No. If a credit card doesn't work in a reader, we should scan it closer to the the reader. Wrong.

I wondered about the bag trick for a while when I thought I'd best apply tewari - thinking through a problem backward (as one does in Go) - to see what I could see. What is a bag doing? It's changing the optics, but despite being a card "reader", it's not really reading anything optically. It's a magnetic strip and what the bag is doing is pushing your card away from the reader to get a better read on it.

If that's the case, do I need the bag? Turns out no. While the bag is a handy way of getting your card away from the reader and going against the usual desire to get closer, more, louder, etc. the actual thing the bag solves is distance. Moving my card away from the reader on my own, actually solves the problem. The card works. Without a magic bag!

So, the next time you've used your card too much and the stripe is down to its last legs and the check-out person says, "Sorry, you're card doesn't work" (and it's one of those annoying places where they won't enter your card), offer to try it for them. Be sure to move the card as far from the reader-side of the slide as possible, and if there's some stripe at all, it will work.

Then, feel free to pass along that you saw the solution on the Way of Go website so that they can tell others. :)

Posted by wayofgo at 03:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack