card readers

Credit and debit cards - which have become more necessary lately, as the pandemic seems to have put an end to easy cash transactions even in smaller shops - have been getting more complicated and require savvy-computer-end-user levels of experience and awareness to use properly.

It used to be that all insert-card readers expected you to put the card in and then immediately pull it out. But it's increasingly common now to get ones requiring you to leave the card in until the DO NOT REMOVE CARD sign changes to REMOVE CARD, which are surprisingly easy to misread the one for the other. I suspect that's to do with the replacement of magnetic stripes with chips.

But then there are ones that not only expect you to pull the card straight out but which don't display anything on the screen until you do. So beware, the tired or distracted user.

Now there are the touchless or tap cards. Oh, watch out for those. I was purchasing groceries and preparing to run a card through the stripe-reader when suddenly the reader displayed "purchase approved" before I'd done anything. Ah, I'd also been holding my wallet and the reader had detected another, touchless card buried deep in a wallet pocket and plonked the purchase on that. Not the card I'd been intending to use.

So, another caution of modern life that they don't specifically warn you about so you have to learn it the hard way: don't let your wallet or other card-holder anywhere near the reader or you may make a surprise purchase.