Monday, April 25, 2011

Cold Turkey

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I have kicked the online shopping monkey and can devote all my computer time now to writing the thriller, answering my emails and playing mah jongg. The bad news is that my credit card is no good.

Not only is my credit card no good, the online account I used to use to look at what was going on with it has been scrubbed. I can't access it. My ID and password are okay, but the account has ceased to exist. But, as I said, this is very exciting. Think of the hours I'll now have to write, play mah jongg, do housework, eat, and go to the gym. Not necessarily in that order.

This all started on Saturday afternoon. The phone rang, and it was a robot from my credit card company hinting darkly at questionable charges that might have been placed on my account. I was offered a number of choices, one of which was to forget the whole thing, roll over, and go back to sleep. It sounded too sinister for that, so I held out for choice number four, which was to speak to a live human. The human was very helpful. Someone had tried to use my credit card number to reserve a room in a cheap motel somewhere in the U.K., she said.

"Nope," I said. "Not me." She said that was what they figured, since whoever tried it had used an address different from mine. The charge had been denied. Still she told me to destroy my credit card and wait till they sent me a new one.

Hey, at least I'm home. The same thing happened three years ago when I was at Malice. I had no way to pay the hotel bill until I discovered a branch of our bank across the street from the convention hotel where I was able to score some cash. We are so vulnerable in the modern day. At any moment credit card failure can strike, leaving one stranded between endeavors like a losing musical-chairs player stranded between chairs.

So now to return to my work in progress. Or my game of mah jongg. Too bad; there are some really cute dresses on the Nieman-Marcus site.

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