That is it! From this point on, I am a simple cash, check or credit girl only!
No more debit for me, thank-you-very-much! Sure it�s convenient and easy and everybody�s doing it, but it seems as though careful as I may be with my account information, people just can�t help themselves from illegally liberating funds from my account to pay off their pathetic lives!
That is right! It has happened again!
I came home yesterday in a swell mood after spending much quality time hanging with the nephew and everything was all happy, happy until I opened a letter from my bank saying my account was overdrawn $600.
Apparently, some fool got a hold of my debit card number and charged over $600 to some professional lawn care company in Atlanta, Georgia.
Had I opened the letter to find I had been billed for$600 worth of liquor from The Booze Chalet, it would have given me reason to pause. But lawn care? C�mon!
Let me point out the obvious: I am not in Atlanta.
Let me take it one step further: I do not have a lawn.
It doesn�t take much to come to the conclusion: if I do not have a lawn in Illinois, I am probably not going to shell out over $600 to care for an ailing lawn in Atlanta, Georgia.
Ridiculous!
And what�s even more funny is, that particular account has never even seen $600, people. Actually, last I checked that account only had exactly 13� in it.
You see, this recently violated account is actually my secondary account. It�s the one I opened after last time this happened to me and my primary account from which someone took $1500 for which I had to wait 10+ days to get back. Yeah, fine, you get the money back, but whatever. I mean, I don�t know about you but I usually do not do well without money for ten days.
Anyway, it was right after that time, I cancelled my debit card, got a good old-fashioned cash-withdrawal-only ATM card and swore off debit forever.
But man, that debit stuff is easy-peasy. You know, like whenever you don�t have any cash and you gotta run into the Walgreens for tampons and such?
So the call of the debit was just too strong. I opened a secondary account with another bank and got a debit card for that account and that account only. Each month, I�d switch a little money from my primary account into the secondary. Never a lot. Just a little bit to you know, cover tampons and $4 coffees and such. When that money runs out, I put in a little bit more when I get around to it.
Which has been awhile, because as I said, I know for a fact that account has had exactly 13� in for a few weeks.
But clearly that did not stop my bank or whoever from authorizing a withdrawal of over $600 to some lawn care company in another goddamn state!.
No, seriously, why does this shit always work for criminals? Because you know had it been me at the register of Walgreens, my arms loaded with $20 worth of tampons with a line full of people behind me � had it been me trying to use my own debit card to float just a simple $20 charge when there was only 13� in that account, had it been me that shit would never have worked.
Oh no, one swipe of my card and DECLINED would have flashed in big bold letters, bells and whistles would have sounded, lights would start flashing and the manager would have come over the in-store speaker yelling, �Your card has been declined. Repeat: your card has been declined. Please step away from the register and walk past that full line of complete strangers so they can shake their heads in a judgmental fashion and take pity on you while you leave the store in shame!�
Yep, that�s what happens in ann-frank�s world.
But criminals? Apparently, illegally charging $600 in lawn care is pie.
Which quite honestly, is like, the most boring thing to steal money for, don�t you think? And subsequently, don�t you think it�d be pretty easy to track someone down by virtue of his or her well-maintained lawn when the police show up at the billed address?
Anyway, times must be tough because the last person to steal the $1500 from my other account paid off like, his cellular phone bill.
Not only is it incredibly dull but it is a wee bit ironic people are choosing to steal my money to pay off their bills because that�s just the poor robbing the poor in my book.
It�s not like I am asking these criminals to buy more expensive things, but look, if you were going to go through the trouble of stealing you would think you�d have a little more fun instead of killing threatening lawn insects, don�t you think? *
Anyway, if you find yourself standing in line at the Walgreens and you are becoming increasingly impatient with the girl in front of you who has taken an extra 3 minutes to write out a simple check as opposed to using her flashy debit card to pay for her TP and toothpaste, you just quit it with the impatient foot-tapping and the put-out sigh, already because it is just me and my fed-up-with-debit-card-ass.
Just hold your horses and say hello, ok?
* Let it be known, as much as I make light of the situation, I should not joke because it could be a lot worse. I know the brilliant mimi smartypants is still dealing with a lot of very ridiculous and frustrating business because of the thieving ho who stole her wallet and went on to steal her identity. Thank goodness ms. smartypants still manages to find her sense of humor within the mess of it all