How I was both careless and stupid
Apr. 17th, 2018 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rscWell, nobody dies, and the inconvenience is definitely minor and first-world, but still...
So, Thursday night (fourth of four nights in San Francisco) at dinner with friends in the Castro, I notice when I get my credit card back from paying the bill that it's not the card I usually use (a BarclayCard tied to JetBlue, which gets me lots of points on the airline I seem to end up on most often), think "Huh" and figures that somehow I got my cards in the wrong order.
Next morning (Friday the 13th, which is of course irrelevant) at breakfast at Cafe Mason, where we always have breakfast when we're in SF (remember this fact), I go to pay with the JetBlue card and realize that the reason that I didn't use it the previous night is that it's not in my wallet at all. A certain amount of panic ensues, especially since I can't get at my account online while traveling because I don't know the password (I keep all my passwords on my home computer, and deliberately don't have them on the iPad or John's laptop for security reasons), but John looks at his CC account and notes that he paid for the charges at the Contemporary Jewish Museum on Thursday, so when did I use the card last? I say it must have been at the De Young Museum on Wednesday afternoon.
I call the De Young, they don't know anything, but transfer me to the security office where any lost-and-found would have ended up, but that number (which they had considerately given me in case the transfer failed) goes to voicemail. I call it again half an hour later, and it still goes to voicemail. Meanwhile we're about to go pick up the rental car to drive down to Palo Alto to have lunch with our friend Arnold and then on to Aptos for our dance weekend, and John suggests that we take a detour to the De Young just in case the card is actually there. So we do that; John drops me off and goes driving around so he can pick me up when I'm done, I spend several minutes determining that the card is not, in fact, at the De Young, and go outside and wait about 15 minutes because John got lost in Golden Gate Park trying to find his way back to the front of the museum. It then takes us forever to fight through city traffic in order to get on 101 south, but once we're on our way I call Arnold to tell him we're going to be late, and then I call the phone number I harvested from the BarclayCard website to report the lost card.
This transaction is surprisingly painless -- I get to talk to a human almost immediately -- and he asks me when I last used the card. I say I think it was at the De Young Museum on April 11. he says, "Well, there's a charge from Cafe Mason on the 12th..."
Metaphorical hand hits figurative forehead. I now know where the card is, and that if I had figured that out at breakfast all this mishegas could have been avoided. But we're speeding south on 101, with no chance of going back, so I tell him yes, that charge is good, and go ahead and cancel the card and send me a new one, which will arrive in "7 to 10 business days".
So I'm ending up with some American points that should have been JetBlue points, and needing to check if I've got any automatic payments on the BarclayCard (I can think of one or two possibilities; I don't do many automatic payments).
Bonus: We arrive at our usual parking garage in Palo Alto, and John can't find his phone. Major panic: Could he possibly have left it at the hotel? Finally he calms down enough to suggest that I try calling it, whereupon it shows up on the passenger seat, where he had put it after using it in an unsuccessful attempt to figure out where he was while lost in Golden Gate Park. I had sat on it all the way to Palo Alto without noticing.
So, Thursday night (fourth of four nights in San Francisco) at dinner with friends in the Castro, I notice when I get my credit card back from paying the bill that it's not the card I usually use (a BarclayCard tied to JetBlue, which gets me lots of points on the airline I seem to end up on most often), think "Huh" and figures that somehow I got my cards in the wrong order.
Next morning (Friday the 13th, which is of course irrelevant) at breakfast at Cafe Mason, where we always have breakfast when we're in SF (remember this fact), I go to pay with the JetBlue card and realize that the reason that I didn't use it the previous night is that it's not in my wallet at all. A certain amount of panic ensues, especially since I can't get at my account online while traveling because I don't know the password (I keep all my passwords on my home computer, and deliberately don't have them on the iPad or John's laptop for security reasons), but John looks at his CC account and notes that he paid for the charges at the Contemporary Jewish Museum on Thursday, so when did I use the card last? I say it must have been at the De Young Museum on Wednesday afternoon.
I call the De Young, they don't know anything, but transfer me to the security office where any lost-and-found would have ended up, but that number (which they had considerately given me in case the transfer failed) goes to voicemail. I call it again half an hour later, and it still goes to voicemail. Meanwhile we're about to go pick up the rental car to drive down to Palo Alto to have lunch with our friend Arnold and then on to Aptos for our dance weekend, and John suggests that we take a detour to the De Young just in case the card is actually there. So we do that; John drops me off and goes driving around so he can pick me up when I'm done, I spend several minutes determining that the card is not, in fact, at the De Young, and go outside and wait about 15 minutes because John got lost in Golden Gate Park trying to find his way back to the front of the museum. It then takes us forever to fight through city traffic in order to get on 101 south, but once we're on our way I call Arnold to tell him we're going to be late, and then I call the phone number I harvested from the BarclayCard website to report the lost card.
This transaction is surprisingly painless -- I get to talk to a human almost immediately -- and he asks me when I last used the card. I say I think it was at the De Young Museum on April 11. he says, "Well, there's a charge from Cafe Mason on the 12th..."
Metaphorical hand hits figurative forehead. I now know where the card is, and that if I had figured that out at breakfast all this mishegas could have been avoided. But we're speeding south on 101, with no chance of going back, so I tell him yes, that charge is good, and go ahead and cancel the card and send me a new one, which will arrive in "7 to 10 business days".
So I'm ending up with some American points that should have been JetBlue points, and needing to check if I've got any automatic payments on the BarclayCard (I can think of one or two possibilities; I don't do many automatic payments).
Bonus: We arrive at our usual parking garage in Palo Alto, and John can't find his phone. Major panic: Could he possibly have left it at the hotel? Finally he calms down enough to suggest that I try calling it, whereupon it shows up on the passenger seat, where he had put it after using it in an unsuccessful attempt to figure out where he was while lost in Golden Gate Park. I had sat on it all the way to Palo Alto without noticing.
