These things don’t usually happen to me. I mean, seriously, they don’t. When I get called by the credit card company checking on a charge, it’s usually my groceries or new dishwasher or something like that. Not this time. This time, I opened up my online checking account and was stunned – OMG!! Coffee shoppes, nail spas, hair styling, vet bills – these are just not me, I mean, we only have chickens, but not pets you take to a vet! There are daily charges going back a week and a half. I am stunned.
Scanning over the charges, I find the last one I recognize. A restaurant – that restaurant, where the waitress was hassled, where she forgot to give me the Senior Discount and then hassled me about changing the charge, telling me it wouldn’t go through, bringing me cash instead of changing the charge. The huddled uncomfortable woman not wanting to correct her mistake, the distraction from the meeting which had started, which I wanted to pay attention to, which was why I was there in the first place.
The bank rep asks if I want to accuse the other person of fraud. Fraud? Because a waitress mixed up our cards? No. That’s silly. This was an honest mistake, isn’t it? Let’s just fix it.
Well, it turns out that when groups of folks get together and have separate checks, the credit cards and debit cards often don’t get back to the right people. And often, it is not a friendly easily rectified mistake (well, kind of easily… it did take hours of my Sunday afternoon, and hers. Thank goodness I didn’t care about the football game!)
Take this as a warning, you waitresses – don’t mess with my card again! I’ll be checking for my name.