Now, That's What I Call An Offering

Saturday my wife was helping to serve a ham & scallop dinner at her church. Sometime into the proceedings, I get a phone call from her. Her purse was stolen, could I please call the credit card people and cancel our credit cards, so that any thieving partakers of pork couldn't use our cards to buy themselves bibles.

She had left her purse on the back of a chair, close to the door. When she came back to it, it was gone. The purse, not the chair.

So, I called Mastercard's toll-free number and was very professionally taken care of by a guy who told me that new cards would be sent to us on Monday.

Then I called Visa's toll-free number and was very professionally taken care of by a lady who told me that new cards would be in our possession in 5 to 10 business days. This lady was very helpful, yet I found her professionalism to be rather frantic. She spoke very quickly and was absolutely confident in what she was saying. Yet there was absolutely no emotion in her voice, no sense that I was talking to a human being. As I was speaking to her, I was thinking "This is what robots will sound like when technology moves forward enough."

The second that I hung up the phone from the flesh and blood Visa robot, the phone rang. It was my wife. She found her purse. The custodian had seen it on the chair, unattended, and had taken it and locked it in the church office.

Not knowing what would be the bigger annoyance - trying to re-activate our present cards by calling the companies back and cancelling the cancellation (a feat I wasn't even sure was possible), or going without credit cards for a week or so (not really that much of an annoyance) - I opted for the annoyance of least energy.