My credit card. My bank card. Two Starbucks cards. I didn’t check the Peet’s Coffee card, my Costco card, or the gift card for Manzana Grill. I’m curious to know if they’re F’d, too.
I have no idea what I could have done differently. All the cards are kept in the same wallet I’ve had for years. I haven’t done anything out of the ordinary. And I have never, ever had a card become unusable, much less all of them on the same day.
The credit and bank cards were so messed up, the ATM wouldn’t even recognize them. I.e., they didn’t even go in the machine. It wouldn’t let them in. At Fred Meyer (a grocery store), the assistant manager said that usually demagnetized cards give an “error” reading. He said my card wasn’t showing anything. Same thing at Starbucks. (Thankfully, at Starbucks, they were able to enter the card #.)
Your wallet was probably exposed to something strongly magnetic - maybe one of those surfaces at a shop counter where they deactivate the security tags, or maybe some prankster with a strong rare earth magnet waved it around near your pocket.
I absent-mindedly put an extremely strong magnet out of a hard drive into my back pocket once, then wondered why none of my cards would work
I was getting my neck imaged, and I was soooooooooooo far in that long, narrow, narrow tube. I totally freaked at first. They placed this weird cage-like contraption over my chest and head–it held me in place. Then another went over my face. I could barely see out the front of it. It helped to close my eyes.
Now I’m just sitting, waiting for them to tell me what the mass is that the CT scan picked up
Ah, see, that’s because metal objects could seriously injure you or the bystanders, so they really, no really, want to take care of that little detail. :eek: Wallets are severely annoying when they get MRI’d but are really low on their priority list in comparison. Me, I wouldn’t have suspected someone would want to lay down on their wallet while in there, but since I don’t often carry a wallet in my pocket I guess I don’t know how comfortable that is or isn’t.
My mind is boggling at how you could be innocently asking “Why are all my credit cards no longer working? I haven’t done anything unusual!”, having just stepped out of an MRI machine.
It’s like me saying “My foot really hurts, but when I move the elephant to take a look, I can’t see anything wrong with it! What’s going on?”
So, unless you carry your wallet in your nose or ear, it looks like the magnetic field from the MRI is very wide – encompassing a foot or two beyond the imaging area? That’s a big-ass mag field.
The field is torroidal (not sure if that’s the right term)–it’s made by a big donut superconductor thingy, so the field is going to extend out of the donut hole (whatever is getting imaged goes in the donut hole.) IIRC, MRI magnets are usually 2-10 Tesla.
My friend was changing the probe on a 500 MHz NMR (similar principal to MRI, but you don’t get pretty maps of bodies) and forgot to take her wallet out. Not only did it try to yank the rubber band out of her hair (it was one of the ones with a metal piece holding it together), but it completely wiped all her cards.
How come I was allowed to wear my ring? It contains no iron, but I didn’t know that at the time. It’s one of those rings I bought at a shop in the “hipster” district of Portland. It’s a spinner ring with shapes of bones. I always assumed it was cheap steel or something, but I tested it now and it’s not. I asked, “And my ring, obviously?” He said no, actually not. My question is, how did he know? They weren’t asking me if I had anything with iron…they asked about metal.
I know, I know. That’s why I didn’t write the pit. (That, and the fact that I don’t write pit threads.) It was totally the purloined letter. And usually I’m really good at figuring things out. I’ll think and think for however long it takes. I guess I was sort of in denial on this one. I couldn’t imagine it was anything I would figure out so I didn’t try. I had had the CT scan the week before, and that obviously didn’t cause any harm, so the MRI just seemed a part of the routine.
I can’t plead total ignorance. I know what the M stands for, but at the same time, it was so unusual that it wasn’t on my radar.
I’m still fascinated that my friend figured it out immediately. It’s not like sat there for an hour discussing it. We were on IM and I typed that my credit cards weren’t working, and the first thing he typed back was, “Did you have it in the MRI machine?” And this was two days later.
