Since I'm Here....

...I shall mumble crankishly in print regarding my morning.

As I'm sure I've intimated more than once, my finances are currently inhabiting Le Crapper. This is largely the lingering aftereffects of supporting a large collection of campers, both human and feline, for quite a lot of time. (Grand total, not counting myself and the two cats I started with: Three humans, one human-under-construction, six felines.) However, there's a fair helping of my own personal financial dingbattery in there too; about mid-July, I got into an overdraft situation, and have been battling it ever since. Why? you ask. Well, if you overdraw an account at my bank, you get a $35 charge. I had a bunch of automatic payments and stuff which I had forgotten were coming up; and so one little overdraft turned into three, or six, or more, and pretty soon those $35's were eating up half my check...You see how these things happen. Since my party people left, I've been striving not to reach that point again, and this month seems like it could be the turning point.

However, it's a precarious time indeed, and so I was unsurprised, last night, to receive an e-mail from I-Go, my car-sharing service, announcing that they had been unable to charge my card for my November balance, and that until this was resolved, I would not be allowed to make new reservations for a car.

Well, that was fine, I thought, but there was one question. I had made a reservation earlier in the week to use a car this morning, so that I could go to the methadone clinic. Without going into addresses or anything, let's say my clinic is about six miles north and four miles west of here, and so it's not something I could walk to, even on a good day. So, wondering if I was going to have to make alternate plans, I called the I-Go people at about 9 last night.

"...and so I was wondering if my reservation for tomorrow is still going to be valid?" I finished, after explaining about the e-mail they'd sent. Well, this guy simply could NOT be arsed to do anything approaching "work". "Um, yeah, I would think so," he said. I let a couple of moments of silence lapse, tempting him to perhaps add something FACTUAL to that opinion, but he let that temptation pass. "Okay, then. Thanks," I said, and failed once again to add, Roxy Hart-style, "....fer NUTHIN'!" So I waited half an hour, called again, and got someone who actually seemed to care about her job a bit. "Hmmm," she said, "I do see it listed on your account, so that's a good sign, but I don't know what the actual policy is. I could have someone call you in the morning when they get in," she offered. Since that turned out to be after 9, I declined; my reservation was for 8:30. "Okay, well, it still IS on your account, but if you have any trouble accessing the car tomorrow morning, I think you can assume that that's the reason."

All this made a good deal of sense to me, and so this morning I put on a fleece jacket, a scarf over that, and my heavy long coat over that. (My mother, when I bought this coat, wanted me to return it; I'd bought a mens' 2x, and she said "It's just too big on you!" I just smiled; there was a method to my madness.) Then I put on my fleece hat, which is easily the dumbest-looking article of clothing EVER, and my heavy gloves, and trekked out to walk 3 blocks for the car.

When I arrived, I held my card against the transponder, and....nothing. I scraped a bit of frost away from the glass and tried again; nada. I said some very profane things, and walked back to 61st to wait for the bus. It took about 10 minutes for the bus to arrive, by which time I was thoroughly chilled despite my very-warm clothing. My second bus, on the other hand, was already at the corner, and only some frantic hand-waving and a slow jog over the street ice allowed me to catch it.

So, after my business at the clinic was complete, I caught the return bus--again, the main bus was at the corner already, and I had to cross against the light so it wouldn't leave without me--and rode to the corner where I was to pick up the bus that would take me the rest of the way home.

I'm not sure if any of you have lived all your lives in southern states, but the rest of you, I'm sure, are familiar with the concept of "wind chill". For the uninitiated, wind chill is the measure of how cold the air temperature actually FEELS on exposed skin, owing to the speed of the wind. This morning, before I left, the news said the wind chill was -15 degrees. Now, while this isn't bad for Chicago as a whole, when you're standing outside for 25 minutes, waiting for a bus which allegedly runs every 20 minutes...Let's just say at that point, the actual NUMBER of the wind chill measurement ceases to matter, and moves into that realm of "REALLY fucking COLD."

And so, eventually, I arrived home, and thawed, and fed the cats, and curled up in a blanket for a few minutes because it felt good. And I could end the story here, having vented appropriately, and it would seem perfectly fine, the story complete. But as you will see, my point in writing this was not solely to bitch about the cold and the CTA; the story goes on from here, because once I was properly re-warmed, I got up, and went to the phone to call I-Go.

Apparently, there is a world of difference between the day shift and the night shift at I-Go HQ. The guy I spoke to this afternoon was much more service-oriented, and apologized profusely for my inconvenience. "Well," I said, "it's not YOUR fault I couldn't pay my bill..."

"Oh, no ma'am," he said. "The problem you experienced this morning had nothing to do with non-payment; that was a technical issue we were experiencing for a couple of hours this morning. If you had called, we could have manually released the lock....".

I shook my head and laughed. Okay, then; so fine, I was frozen to death this morning thanks to a computer glitch, but whatever. I went on to my next question, which was about a refund for some incorrect fees that was supposedly posted to my bank account in mid-November, but which I hadn't yet seen. He went through my invoices and found the information. "I do show that the refund was posted to your account on November 12," he said, and gave me the confirmation number and everything. "This is something you'll need to check with your bank; we've had quite a lot of that lately, where banks get the information but it takes a long time to appear on the account...."

So next, I called my bank. And the nice man at the 800 number looked through my account, and agreed with me--the refunds weren't there.

And then I thought of something.

A couple of months back, while I was working downtown, I had gone into Chase to deposit a check. While I was there, the "personal banker" had talked me into "upgrading" my plain-vanilla debit card to a "rewards" card. I could earn all sorts of blah, blah, blah, yeah okay whatever, might come in handy someday. "You'll still be able to use your current debit card," she said, "but it won't earn you any points." And so when the card arrived in my mail one day, I stuffed it in my wallet and went on about my business.

Now, all my auto-payments, all my recurring charges, everything--all were set up with the old card number. And thinking about it, I realized that I -had- been getting quite a few notices to change my information, or to contact someplace where I'd had an account. Peapod had had a problem, and the CTA couldn't recarge my card, and....So on a whim, while I was on the phome with the Chase guy, waiting for him to finish looking something up, I went back to my I-Go page and entered the new debit card number instead of the old one. I clicked "Update Info" when I was done....

"Your payment has been recieved and your account has been reactivated."

Well I'll be damned, I thought. And when the Chase guy came back from hold, I told him the story: the old card, the "Personal Banker", the assurance that the old card would work...

"Ma'am," he said, once I read him the number of the old card, "I show that the card with that number was deleted from the system on November 16..."

So basically, I froze my ass off this morning because some ditzy little Trixie who works at a bank on Michigan Avenue wanted a commission for upgrading me to the higher-fee card, but couldn't be bothered to get her information right about how that would actually affect my account.

Should anyone wonder, THIS is why I hate "customer service"!!!