Incredible hassles with bank

I decided I'd use the debit card of a bank, which will be unnamed here, to withdraw money while overseas. So I transferred money into the account in preparation.

Wednesday:

Went to an ATM, tried to withdraw money but got rejected. There was a service counter nearby so I asked for help there. They thought my account might have been deactivated because it had been idle and put me through on a phone to their call centre.

Call centre said that they had reactivated the account. Later I found out that what they did was make a $1 transaction between the two linked accounts in my account.

Thursday:

Tried to use the card again. This time not only was the transaction rejected but the ATM captured the card. Called up their call centre and they assured me that new card was on the way.

Went home and found a new card in my mailbox with new features like chip and Paywave. They couldn't have responded that fast and in fact the cover letter was dated several days before. So I assumed that the call centre knew a new card was on the way. Activated it by phone call to the call centre. But one troubling thing was that when I went to set my PIN it showed me a different last 4 digits. Sent internal query to their helpdesk about this discrepancy.

Friday:

Tried to used the card in an ATM again. Again rejected but fortunately card not captured because the ATM design didn't take in the whole card but simply read it and asked for it to be removed.

Went to service counter where they suggested that I choose Savings instead of Cheque. Same result. Suggested I go to the main office just across the street.

Again put through by phone to the call centre. Finally got passed to a rep who gave the whole story. This is the actual sequence of events:

1. Bank sent out new card, call it card B, with new features.
2. Not knowing this, on Wednesday I tried to use my old card, call it card A. Fail.
3. On Thursday I tried to use card A again and it got cancelled and captured perhaps because of too many failed attempts. Called service centre right away.
4. Bank arranged to send out replacement card, call it card C.
5. I found card B in my mailbox and called them to activate it. However what they activated was card C, which accounted for the discrepancy in last 4 digits when setting the PIN.
6. On Friday I tried to use card B, which unknown to me had been deactivated because card C had been activated. Fail.
7. I talked to the call centre. You would think that I could just wait for card C in the pipeline and start using that. But unfortunately their procedures require them to deactivate card C because I have already activated it and someone intercepting it could use it. They can't simply block it temporarily. So they have to send out card D, which they promised to expedite.

So the upshot of it is that I end up with 3 cards, B, C, and D, of which only the last works. I really hope card D arrives in time for my trip.

So it was an unfortunate "race condition" as they say in computer science for steps 1 and 2. If there was a point at which the mistake could have been caught it would be the call centre operator at step 5. He should have double checked that the card in my hand was card C. Maybe if I had done this online, the website might have showed me the card number and I would have discovered the discrepancy. Also if I had been calmer at step 3 and waited until I got home, then I would have seen card B and not triggered the sending of card C. But how was I to know that there was a new card waiting for me at home that evening?

Tuesday, update 1:

Received card D today and activated it online. (Card C arrived on Monday and I put it aside.) The webpage showed me the last 4 digits of the number of card D so I knew I was activating the right one.

As I wrote above, if I had done the activation myself online, the mistake would not have gone so far. But neither the card nor the cover letter mentioned online activation. Next to try it in an ATM.

Wednesday, update 2:

Finally tried it in an ATM (one that reads the card then allows it to be extracted, to be on the safe side) and managed to withdraw a sum of money. Let's hope it works overseas too.

Begin the Beguine

Item A: In Amsterdam there is a Begijnhof, where beguines, women belonging to a lay religious order active in Germany and the Low Countries between the 13th and 16th centuries, once lived. According to Wikipedia: Beguines were not nuns; they did not take vows, could return to the world and wed if they chose and did not renounce their property. The last Amsterdam beguine died in 1971, and today the building is a historical landmark.

Item B: Cole Porter composed the song Begin the Beguine in 1935 and it went on to become a popular hit.

I first encountered the song, and much later the Begijnhof in Amsterdam. I thought it was mere coincidence. What did a religious order from the middle ages have in common with a 20th century secular song? But recently I discovered there indeed was a connection. Wikipedia explains that in the creole of Caribbean, especially Martinique and Guadaloupe, beguine came to mean a white woman, then a style of music and dance, then used as a style by Cole Porter. He did not invent the song form but was indeed responsible for popularising it.

Begin the Beguine is unconventionally long at 108 measures, far longer than the normal 32 bar AABA form. Its score takes up 6 pages in my song book. It is a delight to play but difficult to learn. Besides the lovely modulation, there are also tricky variations in phrasing in similar measures, and learning the lyrics as well helps recall. It is a testament to Cole Porter's songwriting genius.

Being the prototypical beguine, it is perfectly matched to that setting of a digital keyboard or piano. Other songs that go well with this setting are Leroy Anderson's Serenata, Tonight from West Side Story, and Misirlou, another song with a fascinating history.

What is the power of my spectacles?

I needed to know the power my reading glasses to shop for spares. Problem was, I wasn't sure of the exact figure and of course the original sticker had been peeled off long ago. How to find the dioptre without measuring equipment?

Then I recalled the thin lens formula from high school physics:

For a distant object, that term becomes small so for a convex lens the image comes to focus approximately at the focal length.

So I held the spectacles in front of a wall, covering up one lens to avoid double images, and measured the distance at which distant scenery in the window came into focus. I arrived at 0.4m. The dioptre of a lens is the reciprocal of the focal length in metres so the answer was 2.5. That agreed with my recollection of a sticker reading +250.

This procedure doesn't work for concave lenses used for correcting myopia.

Incidentally optometrists state lens power in dioptres because this measurement has the convenient property that the dioptres of two adjacent lenses add, to a first approximation. Sometimes after an eye exam the optometrist will put a thin correcting lens, e.g. 0.25 dioptres in front of your spectacles to show you it's clearer, and so you need to change your next prescription by that much.