To anyone who reads my blog, I apologize once again for the hiatus. I was working on a post related to travel, but I decided to write about an unfortunate event that occurred to me last week instead. If you’ve glanced at the title of this post, then I’m sure you can guess what happened.
Last Wednesday, after a long day of helping students prepare their speeches, I went to an ATM to pay some bills via furikomi (I’ll have a separate post up on paying bills in Japan soon). The darned machine wouldn’t accept my phone number. After a few minutes of drawing kanji on Google Translate, I finally realized I needed to enter my area code. To be honest, I use my phone number so infrequently that I completely forgot about the area code. It’s a poor excuse, but most of my communication happens through the popular Line app. Fortunately, it was an error easy enough to fix, and I successfully entered the number and paid the bill. Hurray for keeping the lights and gas on another month—now I could get out of there. But in my rush to leave so the other customers queued in line could withdraw their cash and stop gawking at the silly foreigner unable to use an ATM, I failed to zip my bag properly.