Originally Posted by snic

Last summer I spent about 45 minutes in line at a train station in a fairly small town in the Netherlands because my non-PIN card didn't work at the kiosk. That's my vacation tick-tocking away as one train after another leaves for Amsterdam. Then, once I got to Amsterdam, I waited another 15 minutes to buy a transit pass that I could have gotten with no wait at a kiosk.

And that's just a couple of examples; this nonsense is familiar to any American who spends any time at all in Europe. So I got a First Tech card and will try it for the first time in the next few weeks.