When I was in Prague on September 1, through an unfortunate turn of events someone apparently stole my wallet. Since my card was in it, I blocked it right away, and luckily I had that “dumb” phone whose battery lasts not days but weeks.
Right after that I went to the post office and applied for a new card. When I told the lady behind the counter that I wanted online payments enabled, she ticked something and I vaguely remember her saying I would have them activated. That whole business of enabling online payments was driving me crazy. I had been there countless times, but every time, after a while, a letter arrived at home saying that the specimen signature did not match, full stop. Ever since I lost my first card, I simply could not make payments online because of this.
Today I am trying to enter my card details into Google because I want to buy something on Google Play, and apparently “The card was declined. Update your card“. Well, I called the helpline with the prefix 495 – I don’t know whether it is a free line or some other kind, nor how much I should be paying per minute. Either way, judging by certain clues, it will be expensive as hell. The young lady on the helpline told me that I could enable it in internet banking. I did not pay attention to what she was saying, I figured I would find it somehow. Well, I didn’t.
I looked up online how to enable it – the problem was that I simply did not have the tab “Payment cards” in my internet banking. So Call II followed – the man there knew what it was about and advised me to switch to the older layout – voila, a new tab was born (or rather appeared on my monitor). But even that did not solve my problem, because I then found out that the new card was not there, only the old stolen one. Hence Call III – again a man told me that the card should show up there on its own by Tuesday, and if not, I have to go to the post office and request that the card be added to internet banking.
And that is exactly what I wanted to avoid at all costs! All I can do now is hope the card shows up there on its own and that I won’t have to go to the post office, sign things, and in the end receive a letter 10 days later saying that the signature does not match. Dealing with that Postal Savings Bank is a total circus. But while I was searching, I found the date the account was opened – namely May 23, 2005 – in other words at the end of ninth grade.
That is more than 7 years ago, and my signature has completely changed. I even know how to change the signature with them now, but so far I am not planning to – though if they reject that signature one more time, they had better watch out :D.