the Truth about Eelskin

[Johanna]

To determine the facts I called up Katie Jarman, the assistant vice president at the Bank of America in San Francisco who was credited with solving the mystery. To my delight, I discovered that Katie, in the great tradition of Straight Dope Home Science, had undertaken an experimental regimen that would have done this column proud.

After a sudden rash of complaints about bad cards from eelskin-wallet owners, Katie and her colleagues examined the magnetic stripe on several failed cards and found that magnetic information had in fact been erased. They further noted that most of the complainers were women who used eelskin wallets with large magnetic clasps. As an experiment, Katie ran a variety of magnetic items over some test cards. Sometimes the cards became demagnetized, sometimes not. But when she ran an eelskin-wallet clasp over the cards, they always became demagnetized, even at a distance of two inches. A call to the fellow who owned the patent on the special donut-shaped magnet used on eelskin wallets confirmed that the magnet was unusually strong. (Why you need a heavy-duty magnet on an eelskin wallet is not clear to me, but hey, not my problem.)

Katie and company then ran a variety of eelskin products that didn't have magnetic clasps over the test cards. (Her boss, a sucker for kitsch, had picked up a boatload of souvenirs during a trip to Korea.) All the cards continued to operate normally. Conclusion: it was the clasp, not the eelskin itself, that did the demagnetizing. (The eel in question, by the way, is the hagfish, not an electric eel.) The Bank of America began advising its customers to keep their teller cards in a separate place to avoid demagnetization.

Meanwhile, eelskin-wallet makers scrambled to save their hides, so to speak.

The Straight Dope

DEPARTMENT OF INDISPENSABLE CLARIFICATIONS

Dear Cecil:

Far be it from me to question you, but in your discussion of eelskin wallets, you mentioned that the "eelskin" in question was actually the skin of the hagfish. Hagfish are agnathans, or jawless fishes, and thus barely related to eels at all. I've had the "honor" of having to care for live hagfish for a zoology class. If you've ever seen one you know it exudes gobs and gobs of disgusting mucus and can turn a whole tank full of water into a tank full of slime in minutes. What I would like to know is (a) how come the companies call them "eelskin" wallets instead of "hagfish" wallets, and ( what do they do with all that slime? --Karen Moody, College Park, Maryland

Dear Karen:

Why do people feel compelled to tell me things like this? My feeling is, if it's long, squirmy, and unconnected to a higher vertebrate, it's an eel. As for the wallet companies' choice of terminology--listen, would you want to be called a "hagfish"?

--CECIL ADAMS