Ugh. Yesterday was another one of those days. I think that I had some sort of weird electromagnetic aura around me yesterday. Every electrical appliance I touched seemed to fizzle and die. I left a path of electric destruction in my wake. Computers crashed. Light bulbs blew. And the automatic teller machine at the bank ate my card.

Under normal circumstances, the bank machine thing would be really annoying. But these weren’t totally normal circumstances. The card that was eaten was my card for my bank account in America. I’m leaving for England tomorrow for a one-week vacation, and I was planning to use the money in my American bank account to see me through my time in England. The only way I can access that money here in Germany is with my bank machine card.

But this stupid machine devoured my card, completely shut down, rebooted very slowly, flashed a message saying that it (the machine) was out of order and then went back to normal - with my card still inside of it.

This has never happened to me before, so I really thought that I could just get the card back and be on my merry way.

Hah! Oh, the naiveté.

I went up to the counter in the bank and said, in a very nice, laughing-with-disbelief sort of way, “The bank machine just ate my card!” The woman behind the counter didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in this and just asked if it was a card from their bank or another bank. When I told her it was from another bank, she said that they couldn’t give out cards from other banks, and that the card would be sent to my bank and I could pick it up there.

At first I thought she meant it would be sent to my German bank - then I told her it was an American card, and she said it would be sent to America. This is when my brain started to melt. This is when I started to get nervous. I said that I needed that card immediately because I needed the money from that account.

This is when the woman standing behind the counter, together with another woman sitting at a desk behind the counter, decided to turn into robots who could only repeat the phrase, “We can’t hand out cards from other banks.”

I said, “You mean there’s nothing I can do?”

The robots said, “We can’t hand out cards from other banks. The card will be sent to the bank in America.”

I went out to Jeremy, panic rising and beginning to mix with anger and desperation. As I realized that had no way to get to all my travel money, the dreaded tears started to well in my eyes, my voice started to shake and I started using a lot of bad words.

I went back into the bank and went back to the woman who had been sitting at the desk before. I told her that I couldn’t accept the fact that I just had to walk away and leave my bank card with them without having filled out a form or anything saying that I had been there in the first place. Maybe I’ve been in Germany too long. I wanted to fill out a form, dammit!

The robot said, “We can’t hand out cards from other banks.”

I said that I understood that, but I didn’t understand how they would even know where to send the card when they fished it out of the machine.

The robot said, “There’s probably an address on the back of the card. We can’t hand out cards from other banks.”

I said that I understood about the “other banks” thing, but I didn’t understand that they didn’t want my name or address or phone number or anything, and that they couldn’t give me any sort of written confirmation of anything at all.

The robot said, “We can’t hand out cards from other banks.”

Jeremy (who had come back in with me for moral support) said, “We know. But could you at least tell us who’s responsible for seeing that the card is sent back to the originating bank and how it all works?”

The robot said, “We can’t hand out cards from other banks.”

I’m not making this up. No matter what I said or asked, the horrible woman just repeated this over and over and over until I thought I would lose my mind. I think I finally did lose my mind. I know I lost my composure and I definitely lost all ability to speak German and was reduced to sobbing something really pithy like “you have dumb machines” before storming out of the bank and collapsing on a bench to say more bad words and cry quite a bit.

There are three things that made this whole situation into such a nightmare.

One. It was not just that the woman I was dealing with displayed such a blatant lack of compassion or sympathy. It was that, from the get-go, she oozed indifference bordering on hostility. I didn’t expect her to give me a hug and say, “It’ll all be okay,” but I did expect a tiny bit of understanding. I just wanted someone to explain nicely and coherently what was happening and why I couldn’t have my card back.

Instead, I was coldly told that “there must have been some reason for the machine to take the card - we can’t hand out cards from other banks,” and I was treated like the whole thing was my fault, like I was a criminal or something. I was in tears, I was being nice and I was trying really, really hard to understand and make myself understood. But I was just brushed off rudely right from the start.

Two. I hate the way I get mad. I hate the fact that I have a short fuse, and I hate the fact that, when I get furious, my voice shakes and I cry. It kind of ruins the fury effect. I hate the fact that I cease being able to think or speak coherently - in any language. And like everyone else in the world, I absolutely hate that esprit d’escalier - the spirit of the stairs - all the things you should have said in the situation but that you only think of after you’ve stormed out of the room (and presumably down some stairs).

And three. More than anything, I hate feeling so helpless, so impotent. I find it nearly impossible in any given situation to simply accept the fact that there is nothing I can do. I always feel like there must be just one thing I could do or say that would change the whole situation. The most horrible aspect of this particular situation, the thing that made me feel most impotent, was being so upset that I couldn’t express myself in German. I just couldn’t do it. Vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation - all gone. I felt completely and utterly helpless, alien, mute. It’s that kind of situation that reminds me of what a powerful thing language is. And of what a control freak I am.

So, that was that. The whole thing probably happened because the magnetic strip on the card was worn out - there’s no other plausible reason. But I’ve written it off. The card is gone and I won’t see it again. I will never step foot in that bank again. I will never rely on a bank machine card as my sole source of money again. I will hunt down some books on anger management or something.

And I’m still going to England. If I have to live on cheap fish and chips for a week, that’s fine by me.

Further reading…