Such a card
One of the more exasperating aspects of 42nd and Treadmill is the fact that our customers are a blabby sort, and if one of them manages to sneak something past the Gods of Customer Service, eventually it goes viral.
To keep costs down, we aggregate credit-card transactions: rather than constantly being on the horn to the merchant bank in East Fiji, we bundle a bunch of them and send them in batch format. (Apple does something vaguely similar to this with the iTunes store: they’re not going to make much of anything with a 99-cent Visa transaction, so they’ll save yours up for a couple of days until you have a respectable $3.96 or so before putting it through.) Downside: people have figured out the cycle, and are buying stuff, discovering that MasterCard won’t cover that much, and then calling in to switch to some other card — even somebody else’s card — before the hammer comes down. It never, of course, occurs to them to check with the issuing bank before they start spending the money they don’t have.
What annoys me, though, is not so much the extra work they generate, but their farging sense of entitlement. Quite apart from their well-rehearsed “You did it for [so-and-so],” there’s a self-righteousness to them that makes me want to take their cards and bring them into close contact with certain internal body tissues of theirs. (Yes, I have gloves for tasks like this. Why do you ask?) It’s probably just as well that they don’t let me talk to the miscreants personally.
fillyjonk »
23 February 2010 · 7:57 am
Very, very similar attitudes seen in students with things like exam make-ups or handing in late work: “But you did it for HER!!!”
Yes, but HER child was rushed to the emergency room at 7 on the morning of the day of the test. You merely overslept in your dorm room.
The sad thing is it pushes the profs to be more hardnosed about leniency in anything for anyone, because we know we’ll get the whiners who think a broken fingernail equates to a sibling involved in a bad car wreck.