After a somewhat hectic first week of holiday, today I finally got round to doing the thing I usually do when I take time off work, which is to pop down to the local Blockbuster and rent all the recent films that I was too disorganised to see in the cinema.

So I browsed around the shelves, picked up some DVDs, took them to the counter, looked in my wallet for my Blockbuster card, and to my great embarrassment it wasn't there. Moreover, I had not the faintest idea where else it might have been – it never comes out of my wallet except in Blockbuster stores, so unless it fell out of its own accord somehow I was at a loss.

The woman at the counter was unfazed. She asked me for a credit card for ID, which I handed over, and within about ten seconds was able to tell me that I'd accidentally left my card in the store the last time I'd been in (September), and that they'd destroyed it.

I was reasonably impressed by the fact that they routinely kept notes on that sort of thing and could retrieve them that efficiently (and also somewhat relieved that I wasn't going to have to go hunting round dark corners of my house and car desperately trying to work out where the errant card could have got to). But ‘reasonably impressed’ gave way to ‘gobsmacked’ when she then – pretty much as part of the same motion – promptly reached under the counter and handed me a shiny new card with my name on it and everything.

I asked whether they'd been keeping that card ready to give to me since they knew I'd lost my previous one, or whether she'd just printed it on the spot on no notice in under ten seconds. She said the latter. In retrospect, I'm not sure which would have impressed me more: the former would have involved very shiny corporate procedures, while the latter involves very shiny technology. Either is good.

(The new card is prettier and less flimsy than the old one, too. Bonus :-)