vahe@iuvax.UUCP (06/03/83)
Recently, my bank in town started offering automated teller services.
As a subscriber, I received a cute little card which has a magnetic strip
on the back, which I suppose has my code number.
Since then, I've had terrible service. My first card was chewed
up (presumably) by one of the machines. My second one never worked,
not from day one. The problem in both cases seems to be a loss of
magnetism in the card (the machine kept telling me to insert the card
strip down). I'm waiting on my third card.
I finally came to the conclusion that I might've been the one
to inadvertently screw up the card. My terminal is in our electronics
shop, and I spend a good part of my day surrounded by CRT's with their
guts hanging out. Finally, my question: do you think the magnetic strip
on the card is weak enough to be affected by me sitting 10 feet from
a bunch of CRT's and oscilloscopes? Has something similar happened to
somebody somewhere else?
Vahe Sarkissian
...{ihnss!inuxc | pur-ee}!iuvax!vahehyder@tekecs.UUCP (06/05/83)
Erased bank and credit card magnetic stripes... The favorite culprit here is our magnetic card keys for the doors. Stored in a wallet with credit cards it has the tendency to erase(scramble?) them all. Lots of luck. (These stripes are lots better than they were 5 years ago.) Paul Hyder (...tektronix!tekecs!hyder)
bentson@csu-cs.UUCP (06/05/83)
I once worked at a firm that used magnetically encoded cards to gain access to the computer room. (The cards also had the typically unflattering photographs on them.) Anyway, as the story goes, one of the service technicians was working on a disk drive. He found the card than was clipped to his shirt pocket was getting in the way, so he took it off and set it down (ON THE HEAD MOTION ACTUATOR!). Needless to say, when he went out for some parts, he couldn't reenter. My officemate also found that a bulk tape eraser also does wonders on the card. Randy Bentson Colo State U - Comp Sci csu-cs!bentson 303/491-7016