So today has been a virtual cornacopia of success and failures in my interactions with various credit card companies.

About a week ago I went to update my credit card info for my Kroger card. The expiration date was this month, and the company had sent me new cards. Well, I apparently destroyed the wrong one, so I called the company to tell them I couldn't find my new card, and they said that they would close the account and send new ones. No problem, I was going to have to update all my automatic payments anyway. The ugly thing is that the first of the month is rapidly approaching, and I still haven't received my new cards.

So, I spent the morning transferring all my automatic payments to our bank debit card. Now here's the good. Apparently as soon as I hit "update" on the Cingular (now AT&T) website, they sent out a "pre-authorization" request for $1 to see if the card was authentic. That in turn somehow triggered the vast computers at Visa to stop and go "hmmmmm...interesting". Scant minutes later my DW gets an automated call for me to check in with Visa on some questionable activity to my card. She calls me, I call them, and we all come to the conclusion that it's probably OK, since the nice lady at Visa says that the charge was 16 minutes ago, and that was almost exactly when I hit "update" on the Cingular page. Sometimes technology works...

...and then sometimes it doesn't. Remember that new BoA checking account I opened? The one that comes with $75 free? Well, unbeknownst to me and every other well meaning BoA customer who has automatic payments set up for their BoA credit card, when you open a checking account, it automatically cancels all existing automatic payments. I go to check my accounts today and find that yesterday's automatic payment wasn't made, and I have a shiny new $39 late fee charge! And a note saying that the automatic payment was cancelled on May 26th. "Well, I certainly didn't do it", I say to myself. ("are you REALLY sure?" I say back..."you're memory has been wrong before...heck, you're talking to yourself right now, and that can't be good")

Anyway [/quiets-the-voices-in-my-head] I call in and talk to a very nice lady who looks into the situation. Then she lets out a knowing *sigh*, one that says "that OTHER dept. in BoA is SOOOOO incompetent, but you didn't hear ME say that". And tells me about what happened. She then proceeds to reverse the $39 charge, and re-instate my 0% interest. ACK!! I hadn't had a chance to think of that. Not only did one side of BoA's lobotomized brain cause me to be charged $39, but it also killed my 0% interest! On $9000, losing that interest rate could have been VERY expensive.

It all worked out in the end, but still...

Oh, and remember that $104.15 that I found yesterday? I was going to apply it to the Kroger card? Yeah, the Kroger credit card website is down....

.......


......!!!!!!!!!!!

One of these days, I'm going to switch to bartering goats for everything and be done with this techno-lifestyle!