sarea | I hate people.

Have read Confessions of a Shopaholic, and I swear to God, I wanted to take a paring knife to the heroine for being so fucking stupid. I mean, I think we all have our little moments of rationalization about careless spending, but this ... this was carrying it too far. And then that she should get out of it so easily! That everything should work out! UGH! (However, I have the 2nd and 3rd books so of course must read them, even though I think I am more done w/ this girl than any Marian Keyes heroine. At least Keyes's heroines are funny.) But I feel much better about my Can You Keep a Secret? rec now, given that I really liked that heroine and despise Becky Bloomwood.

But speaking of spending and credit cards ... synchronicity isn't always cool.

I have too many credit cards. I am fully aware of this. However, there are only three, maybe four, that I really use. And only then because not everywhere takes Discover. (Theoretically, I only use two.) Still, a system that works for me is that the credit cards I don't use, I keep at home in another wallet. They're simply never touched.

Maybe it was reading the Shopaholic books, maybe it's the mad spending spree I've been on recently, but I decided to go ahead and just cancel one of the cards. But when I looked online, there was a charge there for NordicTrack.com. WTF? I hadn't even used this card since September. So I called up the credit card company to report the fraudulent charge ... and all the while I was thinking, "But did I get something from NordicTrack.com and just don't remember?" How embarrassing would it be to dispute a charge and then have it be legitimate? Except then she started rattling off a couple of other places that I supposedly spent money at, and there's no way. Especially when she got to Payless Shoes. But seriously, if you stole someone's credit card, why would you go to Payless? Wouldn't you get some Manolo Blahniks or something?

Anyway, it turns out that the credit card company had recently upgraded my account and gave me a new account number and everything, and sent a new card. I never got the card -- some stranger apparently got hold of it first. But am I right to be a little bit irritated that they would just randomly do that to my account? WTF? How can you get 'upgraded' from a platinum card, anyway??? So really, I blame them.

Now, this other one is totally my fault, although I don't quite understand how it happened. I looked at my wallet during the above fiasco, and noticed that my Discover card was not where it should have been. I didn't want to panic, figuring that maybe I had put it for some reason in my other purse or something, and when I switched purses, it got left behind. Still, I hunted high and low for it, and couldn't find it. So I decided to call the credit card company and see if they could put a temporary hold on the account while I tried to find it -- and at the same time, read back some of my latest charges so I could determine whether or not someone else had it and was using it.

The latest charge was at Chevron, today. Uh oh. Not mine. But a gas charge, so innocuous ... maybe it was mine? Then was told transaction happened at 7am. Fuck. I was so asleep, having stayed up until 4:30am reading Shopaholic, so unless I slept walked to my car, went to Chevron, pumped gas, and returned home, it was definitely not mine. The charge right before it was for the movie theater I was at yesterday, and it was also the last place I could remember using my card. So I must have dropped it or something, and someone picked it up and started using it. (This is where I totally scratch my head, because I can't for the life of me think why I didn't put the card safely back in my wallet. And how did it fall out?)

WHY ARE PEOPLE SO DESPICABLE? I can remember the days when people turned things in, instead of using money/credit cards they found, all willy nilly as if it were their own. Scumbags.

Anyway, so now I'm going to be issued another card. It's stupid, but the thing that bothers me the most about all this is that I'll have a new account number, one unfamiliar to me. This was the card which number I knew by heart (a little bit scary, I know), so I could use it pretty much whenever I wanted to (especially shopping online). And now it'll be new and I won't know it at all. Wah. I know, an extremely minor point, considering. But it adds to my annoyance at myself for not being more careful, and the general pissiness I feel about humanity.