For all you people living in Singapore, I am pretty sure you guys know something about EZ Link cards, right? Come one, even if you don’t take the bus or MRT, you guys should know that it does exist. It’s usually used to pay for our bus fares and MRT fares. And the thing is that it is contactless. Like those access cards you see people use when entering buildings and stuff. All you have to do is to place your wallet (with your EZ Link card) on the terminal and you can pay for your bus fares. You don’t even have to take our the EZ Link card out to “tap” at the terminal. It’s very convenient and I like it. I normally just take out my wallet and tap when I take the bus or MRT. Now, how about Cashcards? Yes, they are used by car owners to pay for the ERP gantry fees you see popping up on the roads everywhere. Oh, it is used to pay for everything else as well. We are talking about a cashless society nowadays. Everywhere you go, it is either card or bust.

Anyway, what is happening now is that Nets (which controls the cashcard monopoly in Singapore) has introduced the Combi Cashcard. What this means is that it is both a contact and contactless card. You can use the old type which slots into a card reader or use a “contactless” terminal. Oh, sure it is good that we don’t have to slot our cashcards into the reader anymore, plus the contactless ones are much more reliable than the contact ones. However, the problem is that the Combi Cashcard interferes with your EZ Link card. So if you have both the EZ Link card and the Combi Cashcard in close proximity, then it won’t work. When you “tap” the terminal with your wallet, nothing happens. I had thought that my EZ Link card was faulty and very nearly bought another one. One of my friends told me that it could be due to the Combi Cashcard that is causing all the problem. You need to take away the Combi Cashcard for the EZ Link card to work. I tried it and yes, it works after that.

Well, this is the example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Both the companies who owned EZ Link and the Combi Cashcards are government owned. They are controlled by the government and everything they do has to be approved by their boss, who is the government. Yet, we see that the cards (which are very necessary for Singaporeans) are interfering with each other, thereby rendering both useless. This is what I would call incompetent, but I won’t say it out loud. And I won’t keep both the cards together either.