Wishing for a Little Less Painlessness...

Last week, Curmie attended what he suspects will be his last professional conference, as he has now retired from a leadership position at an organization that holds its annual meeting there.  But that’s just the background for this essay.

I drove to this one, although it was nearly 500 miles from Chez Curmie; that meant that on arrival I was both very tired and searching for a place to get a good meal… and an adult beverage.  It’s not uncommon for the kind of hotel I was staying at to have room service, or at least a nice on-site restaurant.  This turned out not to be the case, however, as the in-house eatery was a chain sub shop… and it was closed, anyway.

This prompted me to break out the laptop and look for a good restaurant I could walk to.  It turned out that such a place existed in one of the other conference hotels: indeed it was the one where all three sessions I knew I was going to attend were to be held.  And I knew exactly where it was, because my GPS, which had done an admirable job of directing me around the flooding on the shortest route to the conference city and getting me on the right street, decided to direct me to that hotel instead of my own.  Walking a couple of blocks was no problem, in other words.

I had a very good meal that cost a little over three times my per diem for a dinner in that city, paid with my Discover card, and was on my way.  Ah, but there’s a step missing there: I apparently didn’t collect my card and put it back in my wallet.  This was on Wednesday night.

Breakfasts were included with the hotel room, and both lunches and dinners on Thursday and Friday were “working” meals, paid on the organization’s debit card.  That meant it wasn’t until Saturday morning, when I played hooky from the conference to check out the city’s art museum, that I noticed my card was missing.  I called Discover, and the customer service rep handled the situation admirably: she told me the last time the card had been used was at that restaurant, and gave me the choice between freezing the account while I searched for the card or cancelling it, setting me up with a new card and a new account number.  I chose the former option.

When I got back downtown (the art museum is outside the city center), I checked at the hotel, and sure enough, they returned the card to me with minimum hassle.  So now it was time to call Discover and get the card unfrozen (thawed?).  I first got the robovoice, which told me the call might be monitored or recorded, and that they might use some sort of voice recognition to make sure I was who I said I was.  (Really?)  Robovoice also told me they didn’t have a record of my cell phone number and asked if I’d like to include that in my profile.

I was then connected to a person who, like his colleague from the earlier conversation, was affable and efficient.  I identified myself by the last four digits of my Social Security number, my date of birth, and my zip code.  Then, presumably to prove I really did have the card back, I had to read a number on the back of the card—not the security number, a different number in smaller print.  And then I was good to go.

Except…

What if, instead of my card being left at a restaurant, my wallet had been stolen and I didn’t know it (I thought I’d left it in my office or something)?  My SS card is tucked away in there, and my DOB and zip are right there on my driver’s license.  Maybe, maybe, they have a record that the call to freeze the account and the call to unfreeze it came from the same phone number… but it’s certainly possible that one of those calls could have come from my office or home phone (or my hotel room).  And they didn’t have my cell number on file, remember, Gentle Reader?

One of my other accounts requires the answers to not one but three questions—mother’s maiden name, best friend in high school, that sort of thing.  Another first demands a password and then will send a security code to the email address they have on file.  Not so to get my card re-activated.  Indeed, I had to jump through more security hoops to report the card missing than I did to get the account unfrozen. 

I’m grateful that the process was as painless as it was.  I also kinda wish it had been a little less painless.

(Side note: Curmie’s actual Discover card has a shamrock design.  It was good to have it back to use on St. Patrick’s Day.)