Very annoying but most likely not as strange as you think.

I worked as a field engineer for a cash register (point of sale or pos for those in the business crazy ) manufacture and dealing with all the multitude of card processors and their strange rules occupied much of my time.

Every time a card is processed a transaction code is issued by the card proccessing network. In addition to a straight approval or disapproval code there are many other codes. Many of these more obscure codes only show up in specific situations that the processing network define. For most of the obscure codes the code is interpeted by the pos as "have the card holder contact the network or card issuer". Normally, the only thing they want is to verify the card holder is aware of the transaction. Unfortunately, the retailer comes off as the bad guy in most of these transactions.

One way to assign the blame for the unsuccessful transaction to the correct offending party is to request the three or four digit transaction code as well as the tollfree telephone number to call. When you do call you can ask for a definition of the transaction code and why the retailer got that transaction code instead of an approval code.

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