After reading several stories about people not being able to withdraw money from their accounts overseas, I made sure to have the bank issue me the new card for the eps/atm which I rarely ever use these days. I use mostly cash and my visa card when I travel so this is used mostly as a backup in case I lose money or go over my cash budget. I also made sure to activate the new card internationally and set the limit to 20k just in case I needed it.
Still, I wasn't all that surprised when it didn't work overseas after trying several unionpay machines to rule out the possibility of a faulty atm, none of the machines in Vietnam or Cambodia worked with my card.
Now that I'm back in Hong Kong the card still won't work and I just spent 30 minutes at a local branch standing around while they passed me around from one teller to a manager and eventually to another staff member trying to figure out why the card isn't working locally. To further compound this idiotic situation none of them were able to give me a straight answer or an explanation as to why the card was non functional , in fact one guy tried making excuses about tripping a safety measure because I probably tried to withdraw too much money (I tried taking 50usd) from the card.
After ten more minutes of them making calls, one guy told me the card was deactivated but gave no explanation, he then tried to hand me back the deactivated card and asked me if I wanted another one sent through the mail. I don't know what purpose I would have with a deactivated card so I told him to go and f*** himself and walked out, I then tried calling the customer service myself directly in hopes of getting a bit more info - no such luck. Their suggestion was to report a stolen card so I could get another in the mail...
The worst part of all this ins't in all the time I've wasted overseas and locally trying to figure it out, it's in not getting a proper explanation as to why they were unable to provide me the most basic service they are supposed to give to their customers, even after taking the appropriate measures to activate the card.