In a time when all of us decry the power of huge money and the corporations who wield it, I’ve got a nice story about a big corporation. Two big corporations, in fact.<\/p>\n
A few days ago I handed my Amex\/Fidelity credit card to a lady at my long-time music implementation store, Stereo Exchange<\/a>, where I was buying an outrageously expensive grouping of record cleansers. (When they’re expensive, it’s proper to term them “cleansers,” not “cleaners.”)<\/p>\n The Amex\/FIA card was rejected. Not possible. I have a ton of credit on it. But the young lady ran the card two more times. Each time it was rejected.<\/p>\n Stereo Exchange was kind enough to lend me their phone and I called Amex\/FIA. Yes, they’d put a block on my card\u2014and had called me about it (but I never pick up unidentified calls or calls identified as “credit”)\u2014because they suspected some unauthorized charges. The Amex\/FIA lady read a couple of charges to me and, indeed, I hadn’t made them.<\/p>\n Two things really surprised me. First, the charges were for small amounts: 25 bucks, 32 bucks. If someone had ripped off my card number, this person was certainly not adventurously larcenous. Maybe she (I sort of thought this was a female, I don’t know why) was testing the card, seeing how much she could get away with.<\/p>\n But the biggest and best surprise was Amex\/FIA. Three days after the first unauthorized charge, Amex\/FIA put that block on the card and called me. “What made you suspect?” I wondered. I was told that the charges seemed to be foreign, in both senses, to my usual use of the card.<\/p>\n Amex\/FIA temporarily released the block so that I could make the purchase. When I got home, I called Amex\/FIA again and spent quite a few minutes in an investigative sort of mutual musing, trying to figure out where the number might have been lifted.<\/p>\n Amex\/FIA is removing the wrongful charges and is sending me a new card. In the meantime, I have to use … what’s that thing called? Um, you know the word, that element named … what is it again? Oh, yeah. Cash.<\/p>\n But applause to Amex\/FIA. It must have some nifty computer algorithms that (nit)pick up this tiny stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a time when all of us decry the power of huge money and the corporations who wield it, I’ve got a nice story about a big corporation. Two big corporations, in fact. A few days ago I handed my … Continue reading