Just Odd

I’m getting all my stuff ready for my trip. It occurs to me that it might be a good idea to have contact numbers for my credit cards just in case one gets lost or stolen. So I start with “what’s in your wallet” And my oh my what a pain. It took me ten minutes to actually get to a living person. Who knew there could be so many automated menus to go through. I’ve read and heard the thing to do is just press 0 and that will connect you to an actual person. No such luck. But like I said after ten minutes I reached someone. That’s when things really started getting weird.

I asked the guy for the number to call in case I lost the card and explained that I was going on a trip. He said that I would have to talk to the fraud and theft division. I asked why. The guy said this would ensure that no purchases were declined. Now I wasn’t in a particular good mood after it took ten minutes to get through. What I said was I have to get permission to use my card. Oh no sir but you still need to talk to these people.

Now I've heard of people getting calls asking if they purchased certain items. In fact, a friend from work had been to Spain with her family and her husband had gotten a call asking about a purchase. However, that was after the purchase not before. I thought at first I'd misheard the guy but he used the same phrase of a purchase being declined. I figured I needed to talk to the fraud people.

So after I got the contact number, I was transferred and was promptly put on hold for a good five minutes. Gave the person at the fraud department the dates of my trip. And it took three tries for the guy to get it right.

I ended up calling the other two credit card companies and giving them the same information. One of the companies gave me a local number in New Zealand in case I had problems. The other an international number to call collect. “What’s in your wallet” you get to call collect to the US.

I might be changing what’s in my wallet when I get back.