Paying by numbers

At a lively restaurant lunch for six yesterday (Sunday 22^nd June) to mark the departure from these shores of my 92 year-old aunt’s highly-regarded and indeed beloved carer, my father quietly arranged with the manager that he – not his sister – would pay the bill.

For some reason, when he was presented with the handheld wi-fi payment machine, the first time he tapped in his credit card PIN number the transaction ‘failed’. As the manager prepared the machine for a second attempt, my father mischievously commented that he could not understand – in this supposedly-wonderful digital age – why such technology was so hit and miss.

He then added an aside, aimed at nobody in particular, that a couple of years ago, having had a spate of incidents where he erroneously tried to use his debit card PIN on his credit card, and indeed vice versa, he had then temporarily ‘solved’ the problem by writing the debit card PIN on the left cuff on his shirt and the credit card PIN on the right one.

This had apparently worked quite well – that is, until the next time he took his shirt to his favourite laundry man who used to serve in the SAS, whereupon both PIN numbers were obliterated in the wash. Apparently, at this point he couldn’t remember either of them and so had to report himself to his bank to obtain new ones …