The nominal task ahead of me, as I’ve said, is to support myself, day to day, in a foreign land, with nothing but hat money. Well, but I’m a magician, and if you’ve ever seen a magician perform a Danger Trick, you should know the danger isn’t real. If the magician doesn’t get out of the straitjacket in time, the flaming spikes will NOT come crashing down and kill him. No, the timer will go off, but the spikes will not come down, and the magician will not die. He’ll just be embarrassed. Because the guy releasing the spikes isn’t gonna press the button until his boss is clear. Obviously.

Likewise, if I am unable to make enough money on the street on a particular day, I am not going to starve. I’ll just be disappointed, and try again tomorrow. I’ll pay for dinner with a credit card. I will not skip meals, and I will not sleep in the gutter, because I’m 60; I’m supposed to be wise by now, and that would be stupid. My most likely negative scenarios involve disappointment and/or embarrassment. Both are survivable; my failures will be instructive, not fatal.

So today, I set out to secure my safety net, and make sure I will be able to use my bank card in Europe. US Bank is my bank. I like them because they give me their $20/month platinum account and waive the fee because I’m a veteran. I went online to notify them I’d be traveling, and please don’t shut off my card when I use it in Istanbul or something. Nothing worse than a safety net that fails you. It turns out you can’t tell them you’ll be in “Europe”. It’s not a menu option. They want to know what specific country and when. So I tagged England for 90 days and logged off.

The branch office, face to face, couldn’t do better, they suggested I call Customer Service. So I did that, and reached a very nice lady named London. That’s her name, her first name, London. She couldn’t help me much either, and I’m vague on the details, but apparently she couldn’t help because I had already listed England and she couldn’t conflict with my dates. Ummm….. She tried very hard to find a workaround and got some kind of partial success, but the bottom line was, hey, this safety net, it’s not very reliable. Maybe the computer will decide not to let me have my money, and maybe it won’t. So good luck with that. Thank you, anyway, London. You were the very picture of courtesy and I appreciate how sincerely you tried to convince your company’s computer system to perform what really should be a basic service. (I gave her this blog address, so maybe she will read this. You never know.)

Next, I called the number on the back of my Capital One card. Capital One works very hard to keep you from tying up a real live flesh and blood person on the phone, because people like Ms London are troublesome. You have to train them. You have to pay them a salary. You have to give them a desk, and a break room with donuts and coffee. So I never reached a meat person with Capital One. But the computer voice figured out I wanted to tell it about my travel plans. And it assured me that I didn’t need to do that any more. No, now that I have a chip card, I should just relax and use the card anywhere I wanted, and oh by the way, there are no fees for international transactions. Have a lovely trip and take our card with you, by all means.

Hmmm. My US Bank card has one of those chip things too. Ah well. So now my primary safety net is Capital One, and my emergency last ditch parachute that may or may not work, and will charge me 3% to boot, well that’s US Bank.