Earbuds - a hazard to your credit cards

During my last week-long vacation trip, I placed a set of MP3 player's earbuds in my pocket so I could listen to my MP3 players whenever I get bored. (Yes, a week-long vacation could be very boring.) Well, I placed the hotel room card key in the same pocket too. After a day or so, I started having difficulty accessing the hotel facility with the card key. While trying to get the hotel front-desk clerk to re-program my card key, it dawned on me that speaker of the ear bud is made of a large magnet, which could have been slowly re-programming or erasing the information stored in the magnetic strip of the card key. The problem went away after I placed the ear buds in a different pocket.

Just imagine if I placed the earbuds in the same pocket where I stored my wallet. I could have many embarrassing moments when I had to use the credit cards.