Lu and my sister are back from Canberra and shopping already so I fear the wrath of the credit card gods. Speaking of which I need a new visa card after my magnetic stripe got cracked. So I call and order a new card. It all seems to be going well until they ask me where I’d like to send the card. I tell them I want to send it to my home address. The operator puts that in and then tries to generate a new card – as she is doing this she puts me on hold for about ten minutes – when she comes back she says that they can’t send my card to my home address because I live in a ‘high theft area’. Okay I wouldn’t have thought so but I’ll take the bank’s word for it – indeed they’re certainly taking me for every cent with my mortgage. So I give them my work address – which is a high security building. Nope – ‘high theft area’ as well. I try to explain that the mail will be safe because not only do we take security fairly seriously we share offices with the NSW Police and the Department of Correctional Services – also fairly security conscious organisations. But no go. They refuse to send it to my office. Next step is to find a branch that is not so far away. That done they eventually generate a new card – what should have been a five minute process ends up taking nearly 45 minutes. But no the saga is still not over. I wanted to contact the branch I had chosen but do you think they list the phone numbers of the branches in the phone book? No way. That’d make contacting them easy! I had to call their customer service (*lol*) line and then get transfered around until I finally spoke to someone at the branch who informed me that it wasn’t her department and I would need to speak to someone else. I asked her who else and she informed me they were on a break and technically so was she. After some discussion she eventually went and checked and yippee yay my new card was there! Only stumbling block was that I need a drivers license for ID to pick it up. Now since I don’t drive that’ll be interesting. More drama and potential excitement. Fucking banks – always happy to take your money but then make it as difficult as possible to get it back.
Anyways until next time…
Listening to: The whirr of aircon and the mutter of Mark C as he recovers from his hangover.
