It’s an uncommon problem this day and age, but we’ve had a lack of credit cards in the Truman apartment. One of Clancy’s cards expired last June and the new one never got sent to her. A couple months ago her debit card went missing. For my part, I have a Discover card and had a bank debit card.

A couple weeks ago I was eating dinner at a restaurant. We got unusually bad service and I did something that I rarely do: left a tip below 15%. He got the last laugh, however, when I left my credit card in the leather sleave and he declined to turn it in. So for the past couple weeks I’ve been getting one notice after another of declined credit cards and time spent on the phone begging said companies not to kill my credit rating.

All I had was Discover, which may be the card that pays you back but it’s only if places accept it, and a lot don’t.

I don’t trust our mailman. Nevermind our neighbors warning us that nothing left on the front porch will stay there more than fifteen minutes, I don’t trust it to get there in the first place. We are constantly receiving mail addressed to someone else. I don’t mean that it went to our 1080 32nd St instead of 1008 or 1078. It’s not even close misses. We’re getting stuff directed to 1024 and 2023 32nd. Heck, we’re even getting stuff sent to 36th street and 42nd. And if we’re getting other peoples’ stuff, I don’t want to anything sent to me that I wouldn’t mind getting dropped off on some other address on some other street.

So I talked to the people at the Bank of the Northern Hemisphere, but they weren’t much help. Due to liability issues, they can’t just send the card to a bank and allow me to pick it up. The US Postal Service doesn’t send mail to my work (another long story). The only option that I had was to have them send the card to my parents house and they could send it certified or I could fly down there to pick it up. I decided to make a trip home of it and will be flying back into town over the weekend.

The credit card arrived at my folks house yesterday. I called my father earlier today to get the information needed to activate the card so that I could make some online payments. My father, who was a deputy chief auditing accountant for a major Air Force installation with an annual operations budget in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, does not understand bank debit cards. Every time I tried to get the information out of him he told me that I was getting a Debit Card and not a Credit Card and that I could not use it to make online payments. His argument was buttressed by the fact that he had read all of the paperwork, which to say the least was unclear. So I tried to expain to him that it was also a credit card even though it was still debiting from the account. Yes, even though it’s debiting it counts as a credit card because as far as the place you’re using it is concerned it is a credit card. We eventually settled on the (false) fact that this was just a debit card and I must be getting a separate credit card and got on with the transfer of information.

I called and activated the card.

Then I opened the mail.

And voila, the bank had apparently sent two check cards, one to my parents house and one to mine. I called and activated the card I have here and now I have two debit cards in my name on my same bank account.

Either dyin’ of thirst of drinkin’ from a fire hose, I am.