I've Been Robbed. 1
So, tonight I was robbed. At gun point. Fortunately I was not physically harmed, and all that was stolen was my wallet. I was robbed right outside my house which is more than a bit frightening. I don’t much want to go through the details of the incident itself as I haven’t really been able to digest it yet. Indeed, while the whole thing was going on, I was thinking to myself: “I have a gun pointed at me, and I know this is a really dangerous situation and I could die if things go sideways, but I really can’t process that fact right now. Right now I need to focus on remaining calm, not doing anything to surprise or agitate this guy, and giving him my wallet.” I still haven’t really processed the “you could die right now” or the “this really drives home just how vulnerable we all are” aspect of it.
What I have had a wonderful chance to experience is the joy of trying to report all your credit cards, bank cards, etc. are stolen. I think I was able to remember most of what was in my wallet, but that was where the fun started. Without exception, every credit card company I called put me on hold, typically for 5 minutes, once as long as 15 minutes. Just finding the numbers to call was a PITA in a lot of cases. Sure there are numbers on the back of your card, but are their numbers on the company website? Not really. Searching on “stolen card” on the company website wasn’t too useful either. The “contact us” links frequently didn’t have a 24hr number to call to report a lost or stolen card. A lot of the companies I ended up contacting through automated services that first wanted… my card number (hmm… let me get it out of my wallet here… oh yeah, I don’t have that because it was stolen!!!). Eventually I was able to navigate to all of them except my HELOC. Get this: my HELOC card apparently does NOT have a 24hr number I can call to report a lost or stolen card. My ATM card, and my credit card (both with the same company) do, but my HELOC card, which is tied to a MUCH larger credit line than anything else, doesn’t. WTF?
What I don’t get is why there isn’t a button somewhere on all these websites where I can just deactivate my card online. It would save the credit card companies a lot of money in customer service time, and it doesn’t seem nearly as likely to be subject to abuse as most anything else you can do already on these web sites.
The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day 1
The title is probably overstating it, as it’s not like anyone died or is terminally ill, but the last 24 hours haven’t been the best. I think part of it is how it started off as just mildly bad and then grew progressively worse, so the trajectory just made it feel worse and worse.
So, 24 hours ago, I was sitting at my computer, trying to finish up my taxes. Unlike last year, circumstances and my own procrastination had left things up until nearly the last minute. While I contemplated some of the more bizarre elements of the California Tax forms, and yes we really did pass a law providing tax exemptions for victims of the Armenian genocide, fate’s hand was at work in more than one mysterious way.
First there was the realization that the tax man got me good this past year. Despite truly impressive amounts of money handed his way over the course of the year, I still owed him more, Bush tax cuts be damned. Nearly enough to wipe out the ol’ checking account balance. Not that bad really, but not exactly a great way to get you in a good frame of mind, particularly when you are exhausted and ready to crash.
I woke up in the morning to my son’s usual antics, although he was particularly fixated on a pair of his shoes that had been misplaced over the weekend. He’s a clothes horse (yeah, definitely didn’t get that from me), so not being able to wear the preferred pair of shoes to school is a crisis roughly as significant as when the Soviets tried to sneak some missiles in to Cuba. Fortunately, I managed to find the shoes hiding in the last place I’d ever have thought to look for them, so we didn’t have to nuke Russia. That crisis had put me behind schedule, but I’d almost made it out the door when the phone rang. Stupidly, I answered it. That’s when it became clear that this was not going to be a good day….
It was the collections department for the Pottery Barn. Apparently I’d applied for a Pottery Barn credit card this past October, and then promptly ordered over $3,000 worth of Pottery Barn merchandise to be delivered to some place in Gardena. Now, I have never ordered anything from Pottery Barn. My wife certainly has, but frankly she is more than frugal enough that she’d probably have a fit before ordering that much stuff from them. Beyond that, the Gardena address was the dead give away that this was a case of fraud. The nerve racking bit was that whoever ordered the card clearly had some personal information, so this wasn’t a case of mistaken identity, but rather a case of identity theft. The rest of my afternoon was spent unravelling the Kafkaesque world of identity management, which I’ll write about in more detail once I’ve got my head fully wrapped around it.
My wife was tied up in meetings today, so she came home late and exhausted, and my son was in a fussy mood too. While he’s mostly over the horrid period that was our mid-year crisis (terrible twos be damned, as far as I’m concerned it’s a cake walk compared to 3.5), he does seem to be regressing on a few points, the end result being me having to get him to clean up his mess while trying to cook dinner, feed the dogs, and a few other tasks. I can’t complain too much about this part of my day, because I’m all but certain this is what my wife typically experiences during the hour or more before I get home each day.
After surviving dinner, we slogged through the nighttime routine, and all of us were starting to drift off to sleep… Then my son woke up, and promptly vomitted all over his bed. We scrambled him in to the bathroom as quickly as we could. There was enough stuff in his stomach that despite getting a lot on the bed there was more to spread all over the bathtub. Lovely. “Daddy, I don’t like throwing up.” Yeah, me too kid, me too.
So much for getting to sleep early.
The good news is the day is over, and we survived it almost entirely intact. Here’s to a new day, with less drama.