April 15,2009
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News: Santa Cruz' Credit Card Chaos.
This troubled town went into chaos when a fiber link went down this week. All credit card businesses went down with it. Businesses and even banks were closing their doors. Out came the checkbooks. Security went out the window as the vandalized fiber link caused as hapless credit card holders were fraught with trusting strangers with their sensitive credit card vitals just so they could make necessary purchases.
Cell phones went down, Internet went down…even ATMs. Credit card scanners couldn't swipe and people were cash-depleted. Many shops just closed their doors for the day. Sales fell sharply as credit card sales went away.
Many of the banks that remained open would only allow one customer at a time inside their doors. Lines grew quickly outside. Even large banks like Wells-Fargo were shutting down. Max withdrawals were limited to only $1,000. Restaurants and other food outlets went the extra mile to feed their hungry customers by jotting credit card numbers on pieces of scrap paper in hopes of recouping payment on another day when the customers were long gone.
The whole city seemed to be in a stranglehold as the entire communications network went down. The financial sector was at a standstill. Some of the larger business had better luck, however. They had in-house capabilities to store their credit card transactions within local networks that would be safe for batching at a later time. Debit cards were a no-go, however.
It was like a "day without credit cards". If anything good came of it all, it would probably be for the newspaper business. Business was booming, just like the ‘good old days". Bicycle traffic was heavy and one, lucky business in town still had Internet (and lots of business, too). Unknown to most people, NextSpace subscribes to Comcast Internet service. They just happened to be one of the few providers still on-lone on last Thursday. Now they're famous.