Recent Researches: How To Tell If The Japanese Post Office ATM Is Closed

I don’t think you can! The door is still open! The service window is still open! The machine itself is still turned on! The problem is not obvious until you put your crazy moon country debit card in, and it spits it out at you and says it can’t process the card! It doesn’t say that it’s past ATM bedtime! And then you panic, and you think someone’s got into your card in the forty-eight hours since you ordered those Moomins books, and you’ve only got like 6000 yen in cash, and you email Mom because she probably knows what to do!

Actually, now that I’ve managed to find and use a non-closed post office ATM, I’ve realize there was one other symptom - the button saying “visitor withdrawal” didn’t show up when I clicked through to the English language screen yesterday, which it should have done, and did on my successful withdrawal today. Maybe they close visitor withdrawals extra-early during Golden Week, but leave the other options open until normal-early? It’s a mystery!

In related news, I’m thinking of taking the shower curtain out of my shower because it smells weird.

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Oh, and also,

we had another earthquake last night. The Japan Meteorological Agency site says there were intensity-1 quakes in a bunch of nearby cities at exactly the time I felt it, but either Okazaki’s seismographs didn’t pick it up, or it was too weak even to count as a “1″ here. When I asked today, no one else had felt anything. Maybe I’m a geomancer.

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)