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Sneaky. Very sneaky.

The world gets all in a tizz as 1999 draws to a close with Doomsday predictions of nucular (sic) power station meltdown and civilisation grinding to a catastrophic halt at midnight when the world’s computers say “”00″. WTF? That’s not a date, that’s a toilet cleaner” and decide to stop working.

But nothing happens.

Ten years later to the day

The Y2.01K bug strikes.

Debit and credit cards issued in Germany stop working.

“Not all of them, not everywhere, just some of them” say the banks

Which is certainly helpful.

Certainly more helpful that my bank.

My bank appears to be blithely unaware of a problem.

• Nothing on their website (after almost a week)
• Nothing sensible to be learned from the Call Center flossie (and these are qualified banking staff, not your usual CCMs)
• Not a lot from my bank consultant (who is tops, btw) who had a tad more information in the form of an internal paper from Head Office (dated yesterday and telling him less than he could read in this morning’s paper…)

In fact, all I learned from the Call Centre was that

• Other banks’ customers are worse off (Does this really interest me? Hint: No)
• No, they have no idea if my debit and credit cards are affected.
• No, there is no way of finding out.
• No, they have no idea if I can use the cards in Thailand and the USA.
• Yes, they probably will work, but they might not.
• I get incredibly annoyed when I’m constantly interrupted when asking questions (Actually, I knew that already)
• Yes, it might actually be a good idea to put something on the website.
• I should take €2k in cash and traveller cheques on an upcoming trip
• No, they have no idea who’s going to compensate me for my increased costs
• It’s mostly a waste of time talking to Call Centres.

Actually:

They know when the duff batch of chips was manufactured.
They can thus exclude any cards issued before that date.

Having already identified the duff batch of chips,  they know which cards got the chips that don’t know it’s 2010.
So – each card having a number – they can thus identify which customer got a
chronologically-challenged card and issue a new one

And – they can set up a card reader to validate the functionality of the chip.
Distribute it to branches, let customers check their own cards

Programming time?

Maybe a day.

They’ve had 7 already…..