Wow. Has it really been that long since I last was active here? Sheesh!
During the long weekend that I’m currently enjoying, Globalization seems to be a fairly prominent topic. I’ve seen two documentaries on TV about two seperate aspects of it that got me thinking hard and deep on clutural elitism and eurocentric views, as well as trends Europe might certainly miss if it doesn’t stop looking at it’s own agendas so much. And now, going through my feed reader again, I see that one post on Joi Ito’s blog stand out to me, reminding me of my own experiences with American Express.
When I moved from Austria to Germany, I wanted to take my AmEx card with me. Alas, it was a Gold card and not the normal AmEx, so I wanted that in Germany as well. I talked to two different customer representatives on the phone, but both said that they couldn’t issue me the card I wanted. The credit history of me in Germany was not good enough for me to get the Gold card. („Schufa-Auskunft“) I was willing to give them the card number of my Austrian card, but they said that they couldn’t access that data, so it wouldn’t be of any help. To make the long story short (and I do admit that I was fairly angry about it at that time), I signed up for a gold Visa card, got that within days and I’ve been happy with that ever since.
Maybe I might take an interest in AmEx again if they offer me a Centurion card without the yearly membership fee.
