Couple of things here:

• I’ll be picking up the daily posting again, maybe even tonight. It has been wicked busy here in Interrupted Land, which will be obvious when you see what I’m posting.
• I think the rest of May will be Random Theme Month.
• I’ve been so busy I haven’t been updating columns. So I’ll throw this one in. I know it ran in the print edition, because I have it clipped out, but I can’t find it in the web (please tell me you have the Ahwatukee Foothills News saved as a favorite!), which appears to have an eclectic selection of columns.

This one ran on March 23, 2016.

**

I’ve got good news and bad news.

The good news is that my credit card got hacked, which should make you afraid to know what I consider to be ‘bad news.’

The good news isn’t that I got hacked. The good news is that the Credit Card Company was on it like a shot; mere minutes after they realized that some bozo was waving a cloned card around, Credit Card Company texted me and the card was canceled and for all I know they caught the perp red-handed and humiliated said perp publicly with maybe even tar and feathers and a rail right out of town, which is about all I can ask of a Credit Card Company.

The bad news is that when the perp tried to use the card the transaction was declined, meaning that the card was swiped, Credit Card Company thought about it, and then Credit Card Company rejected it and the perp didn’t even walk away with merchandise. So that’s good news, right? That’s what Credit Card Companies are supposed to do, right?

Well, yes; but no, it’s not good, and here’s why:

Our perp was trying to buy an obscene amount of merchandise at a popular purveyor of women’s lingerie. The card was declined, but not because I didn’t have enough room on my card to buy an obscene amount of bustiers, because I’m relieved to know that if I get a jones on to do so, I can.

The card wasn’t declined because the perp was in Ulan Bator and Credit Card Company knows I rarely stray far from Phoenix, much less travel to Central Asia. (This happens to me all the time, to the point where I notify Credit Card Company before I travel. You don’t know how embarrassing it is to be standing in a bra store in Mongolia and have your card rejected.)

No, the card was declined because, as the customer service rep, who was young enough to be my grandson, put it: the attempted purchase was (and this is where he started to stammer incoherently) outside of my “normal spending patterns.”

What? You don’t think that I could use three hundred dollars’ worth of thongs? Or that my husband might want to buy me three hundred dollars’ worth of body stockings for his birthday? This time he hadn’t, of course, but that’s beside the point and it’s a point I guarantee you aren’t ever going to be able to unsee.

No, apparently I put the ‘dud’ back in ‘fuddy duddy,’ because Credit Card Company obviously employs an algorithm that takes into account my weight and the clothing size I usually buy and knows that my cheekini days are over and so they put the kibosh on the whole embarrassing affair so I could start acting my age.

Full disclosure: before all this happened I didn’t even know that there was anything called a ‘cheekini,’ much less know what it is. Word of advice: don’t Google ‘cheekini’ at work. Just sayin’.

So the bad news is that I’m now at the age where I could buy a gross ton of Depends in Mongolia and Credit Card Company would say, “Sure! That sounds like something she’d buy and use! Authorize it!”

And that was news to me.

© E. Stocking Evans 2016