The Hubbub

The robbery took about a minute. Following up has taken hours.

Monday night, of course, there were seven or eight phone calls to get credit and debit cards canceled, plus time on the internet adding fraud alerts to my credit reports, and so on. At one of the credit reporting agencies, the woman on the phone actually tried to hard-sell me one of their services. After listening to her entire spiel I said "You know, this is really the wrong time to be trying to sell me something." After which she actually tried to sell me harder.

Then there was the guy at one of the credit card companies. I called, said my card had been stolen and that it needed to be canceled. "Yes sir, I can take care of that right now for you." Short pause. "And sir, may I ask why you are canceling the card?"

I paused. Had he really just asked that? "Yeah, it's because the card was stolen. During the robbery portion of my evening."

So after all that I watched Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and then part of The Daily Show, and it took that long before I felt sleepy at all. Finally got only four hours of sleep, and then the next day realized I would have to take the day off from work. So I went to the Social Security office to replace my card (hey, you're not supposed to carry the card with you--but I don't think they told me that when I got the card at age 13, and I'd had that thing with me ever since), I went to the DMV to replace my driver's license, and finally everything seemed pretty well taken care of. There would still be some foofaraw once I got all the replacement cards, and had to notify various merchants of changed accounts numbers. But for the most part, the adventure was over.

(Except that yesterday I found myself in the Anger phase of my post-robbery mental adjustment, and it wasn't fun spending a whole day just plain pissed off, but that's a whole other story.)

Then this morning, I got a call from Bank of America's fraud department. The guy wanted to check on some charges, and he led with one from this week--definitely post-robbery--from a merchant I have definitely never used. How on earth had that happened? Turns out that when I called Monday night, BOA simply set me down for a replacement card and didn't cancel the old one. In fact the replacement has the same number as the old one.

Another hour of my life passed, because now I had to double-check my BOA business cards as well--and sure enough, the same foolishness had gone on there, too. No charges on those cards, but still, it looks like the rat-bastards did in fact get away with using one of my cards.

My only hope now is that I can get the name of that merchant to the police, and if one of the robbers actually went to this place to use the card, maybe the police can make some headway in tracking these piss-ants down.

Oh, and by the way--the card they used? It was one of those that had my picture on it. A friend asked, "Well did the robbers look like you?" "Yeah," I said, "I was robbed by Ed Begley Jr. No they didn't look anything like me."

And all of this at a time when the release of the movie is still churning forward and there are a billion things to do. With Marc flying out to Colorado today, I'm left to take care of all the things he would ordinarily do, plus my own stuff. Plus, now, the seemingly endless hubbub following the robbery. Hell, no wonder I'm feeling so damn pissed off.