Globalization

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.