by Henry VIII discovers the contactless payment limit the hard way, at a till, in front of a queue
I once extended unlimited credit to favoured courtiers purely on the strength of my own word. My bank capped my contactless payment at one hundred pounds, and informed me of this fact only once I had already tried to pay for a coat.
The Declined Tap
The card reader flashed red and beeped with what I can only describe as genuine indifference to my rank, the assistant explaining gently that contactless transactions above a certain threshold require the card to be inserted and a pin entered instead, a security measure I found reasonable in principle and genuinely mortifying in front of the queue building behind me.
The Pin
I entered my pin, a four digit number I chose myself and have never once written down, a small act of self-sufficiency I take genuine pride in given how thoroughly this century has otherwise stripped me of financial independence, and the payment cleared instantly, restoring at least some of my dignity along with the coat itself.
The Coat In Question
The coat, a genuinely well made wool overcoat I had been eyeing for a fortnight, proved worth the minor humiliation, and I wore it out of the shop immediately, partly for warmth and partly to signal to the queue behind me that I had, in fact, successfully completed the transaction despite the earlier setback.
The Explanation
Dev later explained the contactless limit exists specifically to protect customers from having a stolen card used freely without verification, a piece of security logic I found genuinely sound once I stopped being personally embarrassed by it, having once lost an entire treasury to considerably less sophisticated theft than a modern card thief could manage in under a minute.
The Verdict
I have since made a point of knowing my balance before any significant purchase, a habit that would have served me equally well during several considerably more consequential financial decisions across my original reign. I once controlled the entire currency of England without a single security check. This century checks me constantly, and I have decided, on reflection, that this probably would have saved me a great deal of trouble the first time round.
The Following Purchase
I have since memorised my pin with genuine confidence and no longer dread the insert-and-enter process at all. Dev has suggested raising my contactless limit through the bank directly, an option I am seriously considering, mainly so the next coat purchase causes rather less of a scene at the till.
Security, it turns out, was worth the brief embarrassment at the till. Security, it turns out, was worth the brief embarrassment at the till, and I no longer flinch even slightly when a reader asks me to insert rather than tap. The coat itself belongs properly in my wardrobe. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: the original account of my own return to Britain, interest rates frozen until the economy agrees to behave, the proper London pub where history finally sat down for a pint.
