I get calls every day from people who are incapable of figuring out where on their credit card their credit/debit card number is located.
I get calls from people every day who cannot figure out that all of the numbers on the front of the card are part of the card number. They seem to think that because the last four digits are inside the hologram they aren’t part of the number.
I seriously do not get it. These are people of every age and background. It seems like an utter impossibility to me that anyone old enough to have a credit or debit card would be so unfamiliar with them that they are unable to identify what the card number is or where it’s found. Even if they personally have never had a card before, how can they not know someone with a card, or have seen a commercial for a card, or seen one used in a store or in a movie or on TV?
Some day, somehow, people will stop making excuses and admit the mass stupidification of the population. I already see people coming to recognize the relentless stupidification of us. But wait until you or one of your loved ones is in a hospital depending on a staff so stupid they cannot figure out measurements of drugs (happens now all the time). Or your airline pilot can’t do it. How did this happen? Accessiblity - dumbing down (which never ends - just gets dumber and dumber), teachers and their unions dominating the school boards. Activities - like sports etc - becoming far more important than academics. I live in Toronto which is supposed to be somewhat better than the u.s. in education (I have my doubts). Yesterday a bright HS grad was telling me that in his school, their teachers always omitted the most difficult test of the year and gave out cheat sheets to make their scores look better for provincial audit requirements. Virtually every school and most teachers, now teach cheating right in class. As much as you might hate it, run a graph of the stupidification of the population alongside the rise of women in influence. I personally have never opposed so-called “womens lib” but the wholesale reduction of every requirement to bring in women and minorities has indisputably lowered the bar to the ground. So live with it.
I don’t see how people getting dumber and more ignorant accounts for not knowing the answer to the question “What is your account number?” when they are in fact holding the credit card in their hand. Phone nervousness or something?
Out of curiosity, do they see the numbers and assume they’re not part of the “credit card number,” or do they just not see the numbers because they’re on the hologram? I can understand people not knowing that credit card numbers have 16 digits.
If it’s really the fact that they’re printed on a hologram, that’s an interesting demonstration of the unintended consequences of design.
Dropping unrelated, inflammatory little nuggets like this is hard to view as anything other than trolling, Sumatraphile. If you want to discuss affirmative action or how dumb women are or whatever, start a thread in Great Debates or the Pit.
Otto, is this a new trend? Because it seems weird that 80 year olds would suddenly be dumb too. After all, they’ve been using credit cards longer than the young dummies have even been alive.
I’m supposing that this was in jest, otherwise this 61-year old Vietnam Vet might have to call down a napalm strike on yo’ ass. Not only do I know where my numbers are, I have them memorized; AND I know what is meant when they ask for the verification code on the back of the card. I have my bank account numbers memorized, my logon numbers for all of my investments memorized, and can even find my friggin’ socks in the morning. So take THAT, ya whippersnapper!
I get numbers from people over the phone quite a bit, and my impression is they don’t see the last 4 numbers, largely due to the hologram. A lot of people don’t really see that well.
Funny thing though, our web order form is flexible with how you enter the card number. Spaces, no spaces, dashes, commas, we strip out non-numeric information and have an algorithm to make sure the number makes sense. So they have to retry until they get that much right. But, even though they can type the number any way they want (“xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”, “xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx”, “xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx”, etc.), 99% seem to use the “xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx” format. That surprises me.
I never did understand why some sites will tell you no spaces, some will tell you spaces, and they make you do it over again. All we need is 16 numbers in the right order here folks, punctuation and white space isn’t that important.
This is just an example of poor programming by the web designer.
It’s a bit harder to allow a more free-form field to accept a variable number of characters, then strip them to 16 numbers. Instead, they make a field that forces you to enter what they expect and do no post processing on it.
It’s a pet peeve of mine, conforming the human to the program rather than the program to the human.
Lazy, worthless, incompetent developers. It’s too much trouble to strip the info (takes all of 5 minutes to program if you know what you’re doing), so it’s much better to make thousands of users do the work instead.
