I'm such a fucking idiot.

Today I didn't do much for the first part of the day -- did laundry, went to Kyotaki to grab a little bit of sushi for lunch, hung out at home, was waiting to hear from Konstantin.

Well, Kon finally is back around 5:30ish. We make plans after some shuffling, to meet up in Shinjuku at 6:45pm and get dinner with him and Ian, hopefully at yakiniku. Kon mentions also wanting to find an ATM.

I realize on my way to the station that I have not very much cash in my wallet either and should stop by the ATM.

So I do.

Only... I don't have any ATM cards in my wallet.

I HAVE NO ATM CARDS IN MY WALLET WTF ALL OF THEM ARE GONE.

My Shinsei, my Japan Post bank card, even my Chase debit card, all gone.

Understandably, I freak out. I search my pockets, my bag, my jacket, etc. Not there.

I run home. I realize there's no way I'll be anywhere near on time to meet them at Shinjuku, and worse, they have no cellphone.

I look around my room. I don't see any ATM cards anywhere obvious. I look around my bed, I go through the pockets of my various pants, I even feel under the bed incase maybe they slipped out of my wallet there. No luck.

I freak out. I find my Shinsei papers and call them like "WHAT THE HELL DO I DO?!!"

Well, the English-speaking lady on the phone tells me it'll take 7-10 days to send me a new ATM card. I'm like "I have no money and need to get to my account, WTF do I do?" We end up cancelling my ATM card and she tells me to go to a Shinsei bank branch tomorrow by 2:30pm; I can get the card reissued in person (though I think they still have to send it to me) and I can take money out of my account then. The banks are closed from Dec 31 - Jan 3, so I have to go TOMORROW morning and take care of this shit.

Ugh.

I check my Chase balance online. It does not appear that anyone has actually found my card and used it, as the balance hasn't changed at all. So that's good.

I grab my Japan Post bank book and run to the station. It turns out I have all of 4168 yen left in that account. I withdraw 4000 yen. I figure I really ought to close the goddamn account anyway since I never use it.

I get to Shinjuku at 7:15, half an hour late. I do eventually find Kon and Ian and explain to them what happened. They're understanding about it and Konstantin even agrees to cover me for the evening, and I'll pay him back either tomorrow or in Seattle if I can't straighten things out by tomorrow. Whee.

So, after wandering around a bit and being faced with a 45-minute wait at Momo Paradise, we end up at the yakiniku place I went to the bounenkai with the Meiji University baseball club. As it turns out, for that party we had some major badass course tabehodai thing. For us, we get the 3150-yen tabehodai, which is super-expensive compared to my normal sort of thing but it was really really good quality meat, actually, and we really stuffed our faces (all of us were starved after not eating much all day).

Then, karaoke. Ian turns out to be really good at karaoke. Konstantin is not. So it's mostly two of us singing and the third just listening. We only did an hour anyway. Good times. We agree to meet up again tomorrow to do more singing and more fooding and also to hopefully see the Space Battleship Yamato movie since I've been too lazy to see it on my own.

I get home and think that before I go to the effort to call Chase in the USA and get my card cancelled or whatever, I'm going to do a thorough search through my room of EVERYTHING I have touched in the last several days, since the last time I remember actually going to an ATM. Remember, I've brought a lot of stuff home from school, among other things...

...and sure fucking enough, in one of the bags I carried shit home from school in, my ATM cards are in there. All 3 of them. I'm both elated and horribly pissed off at myself. I think this was the day I was wearing a skirt at school and couldn't carry my wallet easily, maybe, so I would have put it into a bag to take it home. It looks kinda like my wallet must have been in there, the cards must have fallen out when I threw the wallet in... and I took the wallet out and didn't notice the cards weren't in it.

Sigh.

So, the good news is that I don't have to call Chase. And that I'm not going to go cancel the postal account yet. (Infact I'm figuring that I'll go take out a whole wad of cash from Shinsei tomorrow in person, then throw a lot of it into the postal account; I figure that might be easier to access during my trip to Kyushu anyway since post offices are possibly more common than 7-11's down there.)

The bad news is that I'm a fucking moron and I won't have a working ATM card for a week or two. Which sucks because, I mean, I'm only going to BE here for 3 more weeks.

Oh well.

It could be worse, I guess.

Anyway, tomorrow morning I'll be going to Shinsei. I feel so stupid.

Japanese banks are maybe not as dumb as they seem

My old ATM card works again. They don't have to reissue one.

Basically, I went in and explained the situation (in Japanese, go me), and so they took my card and took my gaijin ID card and had me fill out a paper saying, as far as I could tell, "there was a mistake with my ATM card and it was stopped and I would like it to be reinstated", (you know what's stupid? I knew the word for "account" in Japanese but didn't realize it was written 口座) and then were like "We think we can make your card work again -- please wait about 5 minutes for it to go through the system?"

So I waited. And they called me back and said that yeah, it should work again. The bank is on the 2nd floor and the ATMs are on the first floor, so they were like "go try it out -- if there's a problem come back, otherwise, thank you and have a nice day"

And I went downstairs and it worked!!!!!!!!!!!!11

So, hooray.

I got lunch at Tenkazushi to celebrate (well, just because, hey, sushi and it's near the Shinsei in Ikebukuro) and then went back to Akabane. I paid my rent and stopped by the bookstore and then came home via Ito Yokado, where I picked up a few things I needed around the house (and a few things I didn't, like a Super Mario plushie of the cloud dude who drops spiky shells on you because OMG I had no idea it existed and it's so cute and HEY I HAD MONEY). I also put some money in my postal bank account out of vague paranoia.

And hopefully in an hour or two when Kon and Ian get finished with Comiket they'll ping me and we'll go see a movie and stuff and I can pay them back for yesterday.

Yay.

Everything's back to normal, I guess. The good part is now I will be super-paranoid to make sure I always have my ATM card...