Life Moves Along
It’s funny how life keeps moving, even after violent upheavals. While I’m still dealing with the aftermath of the break-in, things are pretty much back to “normal.” “Normal” meaning that I get up in the morning, get ready, go to work at 8, get home at 5:15, fix dinner with Mom, eat dinner, help Mom clean up dinner, and then get the kids in bed.
The biggest difference is that after tucking the kids in, I’m working on the “stolen property” spreadsheet instead of blogging, surfing, and playing online Scrabble. I’m much more tired than usual, which is, I suppose, to be expected. I’m still feeling a lot of stress about the whole thing. And stupid people don’t help.
Like the credit card people today. I ran out of temporary checks, and I have a couple of bills coming due shortly. So I called one of the credit card companies to make a phone payment. Now, I expected some questions, since there’s a fraud alert on all of my accounts — even the new ones. But what I went through was just silly.
The first customer service person was very nice, and seemed quite competent. She was sympathetic to my problem, and quickly pulled up my new account information. Then she said, “Oh, I can’t take your payment. There’s a fraud alert on your account, so you’ll have to talk to the fraud department before you can make a payment.” Okay, this makes sense. They want to make sure I’m who I say I am. So she transfers me to the fraud department.
After answering about six questions, the fraud rep tells me that it’s too soon for my new cards to arrive, as the report was made on Friday and the new cards were only mailed yesterday. She went on and on, and I kept waiting for a break in the speech so that I could tell her what I needed, since the first person obviously hadn’t done so. But she just kept talking at approximately 160 words per minute, so I finally took a deep breath and interrupted.
“That’s not what I’m calling about. I need to make a phone payment, as I have no checks and no way to pay online at this time.”
“Well, customer service will have to take your payment.”
“Customer service just transferred me to you!”
“Well, let me transfer you back to them and you can make your payment.”
Right. So what ought to have taken me about five minutes, tops, to accomplish, ended up taking me almost twenty. Things like that don’t make this any easier. Sigh. I keep telling myself that it hasn’t even been a week, and this, too, shall pass. I just hope it’s soon. I have two other legal battles going on at the moment, and I really need a break!