I work at a fairly large company, and the cafeterias will let employee put money on their badges to be used for later purchases. I don’t usually do that, but I suppose it’s convenient for people that don’t want to carry cash, since the cafeteria doesn’t accept debit cards. (I think accepting debit cards, even with a small fee, would be more useful.)
Usually this works pretty well. The employee or cashier puts the badge up against a reader. Today I was behind someone who’d forgotten his badge, and had a temporary badge. He gave the cashier a piece of paper with a long string of numbers or some such, and she keyed it into the POS terminal, and it didn’t take. She asked him his name, and it was some long hard-to-spell name. She tried to enter it using an on-screen keyboard on the touchscreen display several times, then let him try it, and he had trouble with it too.
As I was waiting there, several people abandoned the line to find another one. Eventually I gave up too.
I think if I’d forgotten my badge I’d either pay cash (there’s an ATM in the cafeteria), or go home and get the badge.