Messing up is golden

Yesterday I tried to make a purchase, luckily for me this was an internet purchase, as to my surprise my purchase was denied. My creditcard was not accepted. Imagine that happening when you want to check out of your hotel and you cannot pay your bill.

Alright that last bit would not have happened, as I carry two cards, and this card was my backup card.
Yet, you never know, there is a reason why I keep both my cards separate, so that if I lose one, I have the other one as backup, and I would have had a problem.

I tried to call my bank, well that succeeded, using Skype. Then it turned out they could not help me and gave me a number of their credit card service, that failed, as Skype did not agree with the new numbers automatic answer machine.

So today I tried again, from work. The girl on the other line sounded like she could have been my 12 year old niece. She understandably asked me confirmation questions, quite a lot of them and then asked me if she could help.

I told her my card didn't work and she checked and found no block on the card (that was a relief)
Then she checked my purchase. I had used the wrong expiry date... Could I tell her the expiry date please.
I told her what was on the card:

She said that that was not right, so my obvious question was, what is it then?
Then to my surprise she said, I cannot give you that information...

So I am in India, 7500km from home, I gave this girl all the answers on the questions she wanted, and she cannot give me my credit cards expiry date. So I offer her the number on the back that's used as security number, every company can check that, but she didn't have THAT information to check...

Fortunately she was nice enough to ask her supervisor, who agreed to giving me the expiry date, it was not 2015, which I must say seemed a bit long for a credit card. But it was 2011 (figures).

So with this new information I go back to my hotelroom and after working for a few hours, I decide to try this new expiry date...*WRONG*
Still my purchase was declined.
So knowing my expiry year, I start trying other months, which was possible in this website, cause it didn't have a maximum number of tries. After 9 tries it finally worked...

Now I know the expiry date of my card, I have a faulty card obviously. It was never this hard to get to use my shiny golden card though.