The big picture

Looking Out To The Sea, originally uploaded by williamnyk.

Someone I know vacationed in Nepal recently. To his and everyone's disbelief, he was robbed. No, the amazement was not the robbing but the fact it was done via a stun gun! Stun gun in Nepal!

In fact, he didn't know it was a stun gun effect until someone else told him so. He felt electrick shock and then was in a dream-like state while he was being robbed. It was a good thing he didn't carry all his cash with him. So here's a tip: don't carry all your cash while on vacation.

He quickly alerted the banks that issued his credit cards. Once back in Malaysia, he called RHB and EON Bank. Here's the second amazing fact of this incident: despite having told the banks that he was robbed, the banks still ask him to pay a fee for them to reissue cards!

Seriously, are they brainless? For a mere RM50 and due to no fault of the customer, they're willing to lose a customer and potentially many other customers (words do spread around). I can understand if he has lost the card due to carelessness but he was robbed for goodness sake.

Hence, he just instructed them to simply cancel his credit card as he can always apply for credit cards elsewhere. RHB just stupidly did that. EON Bank was smart enough to check and discovered that he is a valuable customer and it didn't take them long to offer to waive the fee. Either bank should have just offered to waive the fee regardless of whether he's a "first class" customer or not.

Here's another tip: see the big picture.