The End of Cash… Maybe…
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, Gripes, Health, Living in Korea
Sitting here in what might laughingly be called a “living room” on a Saturday morning after a painful and traumatic week, when everything seemed to go wrong… but as I was practising some bodily manoeuvres this morning for the alleviation of leg pain, something interesting suddenly dawned on me…
Last Wednesday, I started to have trouble with what now appears to be a sciatica-related condition (I spent this morning digging up videos about this and applying the knowledge, and surprisingly, so far at least, I have not yet felt the need to reach for the analgesic and muscle relaxant pills I was prescribed this Monday). By Friday night last week it had become excruciating, but as it could hardly be described as “life-threatening”, I decided to wait until Monday morning before trying to hit the San Carollo Hospital and see if a consultant could enlighten me.
As it happened, by that time it had proven possible to mitigate the pain, but this basically meant staying in bed, and even then I would still get painful sessions. Clearly, something had to be done, because I had to be back in work on Tuesday. However, it represented an opportunity to re-acquaint myself with my collection of Elric novels, which my sister had sent to me from England previously…
The trouble was that I had already had a minor disaster in the form of the expiration of my debit card. Calling (eventually) Nonghyup representatives and also hitting a local small branch of the bank a couple of times, I discovered that, firstly, I could not have the card reissued until I started a new E2 visa renewal (!) and secondly, the local branch could not even issue a new ATM card because they were only a small local franchise office; therefore, I had to basically travel halfway across Suncheon, by taxi, of course (because there is no direct bus route there), on a late Friday morning, to the branch where my replacement debit card (replacing the one that I lost shortly after arriving here) had been supplied earlier last year. Obviously, they had no problem at that point because I had just signed a new contract and extended my visa. However, I had also to be in work by about 1:30 that afternoon, at the latest, and what a surprise, there were only two clerks behind the counter (complete with those unnecessary plastic screens due to an unscientific, superstitious and factually unprovable concept of disease transmission), and progress was painfully slow. I think I had to wait almost an hour before more clerks came back to their desks, and then things changed; but there was a preponderance of older customers who needed to undertake certain financial tasks and they all seemed to be taking forever; one elderly female customer, at the desk right in front of me, kept jumping up and down all the time, for no apparent reason, and I swear that everyone else there was feeling the same; impatient. I took a ticket and sat there waiting, and there were eleven other customers waiting before me…
Thankfully, everything was smoothed out rapidly: first a new ATM card was issued, then I got my Nonghyup phone app reactivated (because a damaged battery forced me to get a new phone recently, which turned out to be a whole other story on its own), and finally, halleluyah! – I was able to get a new bank book… why? Well, it turns out that when Times Media took me back in 2019, they asked me for my current bank book to get my account details… and I never saw it again. As a result, for the last four years, I have been conducting all of my finances through a set of ATMs, never needing the clerks at all; at the same time, in transiting between various locations, it also looks like I lost my old ATM card as well!
A stressful and painful morning, to be sure, but I got all of the results that were possible, if not actually desirable. I will discuss what I think will be the ultimate sequelae of this briefly later, but for now, let me add that as the new academic year approaches, my manager has been rearranging students between classes according to language level, and it has been chaos. While all of this has been happening, I have been in agony, as repetitive strains have exacerbated my condition; even the powerful analgesic prescribed for me by Doctor Choi at San Carollo, plus his prescribed muscle relaxant, could not alleviate the pain completely, but at least it was not as bad as the previous Friday.
However, this succession of misfortunes has made me recognise something: there is a lot of talk these days about how banks and governments want to transition to all-electronic finances in order to avoid the need for physical money (and thereby, also, conveniently control people in a way that cannot be resisted). I have seen several flaws in this here in Korea, the first being that when I was living in Daegu and using a travel card before receiving my first Nonghyup Bazik debit card; it didn’t seem to be possible, at the subway station, to reload the travel card electronically, but the machine had to be fed cash, and this meant, of course, paper money… which was strange because I had had a number of these RFID devices for some years and never had any problem paying for them at, say, a local convenience store using the Bazik card; no problem.
Now, a second idea has struck me: how will a universal, purely electronic system be possible when banks have rules which prevent the issuance of the cards necessary to use that system? Admittedly, my case is different because I am not a Korean national, and the process is therefore affected by the need for a sufficiently long visa, but does this not start to take on the appearance of an unexpected showstopper? Will this result in prosecutions, as customers will easily be able to demonstrate that the refusal to issue is unreasonable? Personally, I do not think that the idea of having a glass-coated RFID device subcutaneously is a particularly good idea (although some people, particularly in places like Sweden, seem to like the concept of having the Mark of the Beast on their bodies; I think these people are more lefty mind-slave types), and the practicalities of such systems (in terms of there being a necessary minimum transaction size for any payment to be practical) seem to suggest to me that either the system cannot be one hundred per cent. penetrant, or alternatively, that certain types of transactions will become impossible (due to a lower limit on transaction size imposed by overall cost) and will actually disappear because notes and small change will no longer be available for them… or perhaps this is actually what “somebody” wants?