I came home from being gone for a few days to find I'd finally received my replacement credit card in the mail. I don't tend to keep money in my checking account anymore and usually charge everything to the card and pay it off at the end of the month, so in a certain sense, it's my first resource for money. I took the card out of the envelope and went through the process of calling from my home phone so they could verify it was actually me who had the card and not someone else. I woke up today and headed out to the grocery store to buy much needed food. I get up to the register (with a line of people behind me), and my card keeps getting rejected. I'm irritated because I know I activated the card, and it's embarrassing to have your card rejected with people lined up behind you like that. I had to charge the groceries to my AmEx and came home to call B of A.

The usual process of calling any Customer Service line is to now wait on hold, explain everything to the first person, only to be told you need to speak with another department. Get transferred, wait on hold again, get second person on the phone who you have to repeat not only your account number and verification info to, but the entire story all over again. Needless to say, by the time I got to the third person, I was already not pleased. I repeated (again) that I had activated my card but it was being declined, and the guy said, "Well, because of the fraud on your account, we needed to verify the transaction with you." ??? I asked, "Then what was the point of activating the account FROM MY HOME PHONE with you?" Ultimately, he had no decent response, other than continuing to repeat the same unacceptable answer to me. I suggested, not very kindly, that perhaps they might be able to come up with a better process of verification (since I'd already gone through the process while activating my card) that wouldn't result in being publicly embarrassed. After all, I am the victim in this situation. This is just more proof that Customer Service doesn't exist anymore. It's why pages like this one have popped up.

The song of the day is "Celebrity Skin" by Hole off their 1998 album of the same name. I loved Nirvana, and was therefore under the belief that Courtney Love must have somehow been responsible for the death of Kurt Cobain, or at the very least of breaking up the band a la Yoko, so I wanted to hate the band Hole. Unfortunately, I loved them from the time I heard this song and ultimately bought the CD which I loved as well. She might be crazy as all get out, but her band was tight and rocked.