ATM cards

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Oh yeah, a lot of places in San Francisco are cash-only. So, the other day I tried taking out some money at the ATM, and thus took out my debit card for the first time since the pandemic started.

It was declined, with an error that the card had been blocked.

I tried to figure out what was going on through my bank’s website and it only gave very evasive information. Reading up online it seems that most banks end up blocking debit cards which haven’t been used in a while, as a security precaution.

So just now I finally got around to calling them on the phone, and it turns out that’s exactly what happened, and unsurprisingly the bank is handling a lot of calls like this lately, because of how many people haven’t needed cash since March, 2020 until now.

It’d have been nice if my bank had, like, warned me about this rather than leaving me in the lurch while traveling, but much like the Y2K+20 problem it’s probably not anything that anyone had really thought about until it was too late.