He takes my hand by the wrist and plants my palm
on the touchscreen and a little ribbon of paper with zero-zero-one
slides out. I take it and he goes back behind his counter and says,
'*Numero un*!'
"I can tell this is not going to work out, but I need to go through the
motions. I go to the counter and ask for a seven-day card. He opens his
cash drawer and paws through a pile of cards, then smiles and shakes his
head and says, sorry, all sold out. My girlfriend is probably through
her second cup of coffee and reading brochures for nature walks in the
Alps at this point, so I say, fine, give me a one-day card. He takes a
moment to snicker at my French, then says, so sorry, sold out those,
too. Two hours? Nope. Half an hour? Oh, those we got.
"Think about this for a second. I am sitting there with my laptop in
hand, at six in the morning, on a Swiss street, connected to Swisscom's
network, a credit card in my other hand, wishing to give them some money
in exchange for the use of their network, and instead I have to go
chasing up and down every hotel in Geneva for a card, which is not to be
found. So I go to the origin of these cards, the Swisscom store, and
they're sold out, too. This is not a T-shirt or a loaf of bread: there's
no inherent scarcity in two-hour or seven-day cards. The cards are just
a convenient place to print some numbers, and all you need to do to make
more numbers is pull them out of thin air.
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