It all started with a simple email in my inbox: “Irregular Credit Card Activity.”
Great. Not because I was fearful that someone had gotten our information or anything like that. It was more an issue of life as an expat.
You see, sometimes things are just not as easy as one would like. This credit card company thought they were doing me a favor by verifying that my account was being charged by me and not someone else. But really, they were asking me to play twenty questions with them which will result in making me look like a complete space cadet.
Because you see, when you live overseas, you find that there are some American companies which simply refuse to send their products outside the U.S. You decide to “simplify” life and get a mail-forwarding address and have most of your credit info through that address. But for some reason, you occasionally decide to throw yourself a zinger and put one card to your foreign address. You don’t really keep track of which one but you generally recall you did it. And sometimes to really screw with yourself, you add the address of a family member, too. Now we’ve got at least three possible addresses to remember when they start grilling you.
So I called the bank’s service number and I go through about 15 phone menus which required dialing about 100 numbers and I was just praying the battery on the phone didn’t run out in the middle of the call when I finally got a live person on the line. Unfortunately that person, who was clearly in India where the weather must not be so great because it was a pretty bad connection–or maybe he just had me on the speaker phone as he was playing Wii, transfers me to a whole new department where I have to start all over again with the recitation of my account information. You’d think I’d have all those digits memorized by now.
This lovely woman on the phone, who actually seemed to be sitting in the United States, asks ever so kindly what she can do for me. So I tell her about the dooming email and she tells me she just needs to ask a few questions to verify information on my account. Okie dokie.
“What is the address on the account?”
It seems a harmless and simple question to most. But as I explained above, I’ve made it far more complicated than that. So I give her my mail forwarding address, completely oblivious to the fact that it could be another address. But it’s not that address and she asks if it maybe could be something else. Hmm, right. So I rattle off the Germany address and, BINGO, we have a match.
“Do you have any other accounts with our bank?”
Oh Lord help us. I have multiples. I have checking accounts, other credit cards, small business accounts. But how many? Do I know ANYTHING about them? What will the next question of doom be after I hesitantly answer, “Um, yes. I have a few.”
“Could you tell us the balance on a shared account you have?”
“Actually no. Because, although I’m on the account, I don’t actually have anything to do with the account. So I have no clue what amount is in there. I can log in to my online access and tell you though.” I must be starting to sound really sketchy to this woman now.
“Ok, let’s try this.”
Guess that last answer wasn’t what she was looking for. And she asks me something else off the wall that I have no straight answer for. Again. I’m sure she’s just going to hang up on me at any moment.
Thankfully the operator stuck it out with me and finally just asked for my security code on the back of the card. Things really got rolling after that and we got everything cleared up. After she scolded me a bit and told me to stop using an old credit card. She said it a few times to make sure I got the point so she must have thought I was really dull. And I did get off the phone feeling like a total dolt.
It was like those questions they give you from your credit reports that have to do with some place you lived in from 1999-2002. And they give you options and you don’t recognize anything but you think it’s some sort of trick so you cautiously click the box next to the line that says, “None of these” and pray like crazy.
Have you ever experienced one of those phone calls? Or was I just having a serious blond moment?
