the daily snivel

I got a call today from the bank that has seen fit to issue me a credit card, asking me to verify a charge for $8000 that had been made by a mail-order company somewhere in the United States. I've rarely made a funnier face than the one that crossed my mug when I heard that request, and I kind of wish you'd been there to see it. The moment was unique, and (hopefully) now one that hopefully has been relegated to the past.

I immediately had the card cancelled and destroyed it. Ever since then, I've been picking my brains trying to figure out the last time I used my card, and how someone else might have gotten the number. I can't remember purchasing anything on-line with it, or even going out to dinner and paying for the meal. Nothing on my last statement suggests anything suspicious -- in fact, I've barely used it at all since the Spring, mainly because I was extremely poor until I started working, and tended to hover around the limit.

The most disturbing possibility emergest out of an unfortunate blunder I made last weekend. It was a Friday, around 6pm, I was in the office by myself, and I was getting ready to go home. After picking up my bicycle from the shop (it had a broken spoke), I returned to work to change out of my work clothes and into a comfortable t-shirt and cycling shorts for the ride home. It was late; I was tired. I emptied the pockets of my slacks and went to the washroom to change. Then I packed up the rest of my things and cycled home.

That is, I packed up the rest of my things except for my wallet. It lay, forgotten, on top of my desk; a stupid mistake that I'd made in the numbskullery of a late afternoon without coffee. I hadn't realized this until I made it home and intended to go out and see my friend Celeste, and by that point it was much too late to go back for it. The building gets locked up over the weekends, and I only have key to our office door. So, all I could do is hope that it would be safely waiting for me when I returned on Monday morning.

Now, implicit in that hope is the hope that no one like cleaning staff would, say, come in over the weekend, grab my wallet, and copy down my credit card numbers. But apparently something like this may have happened. It's very difficult to say for sure. Still, here we do have a mysterious charge to my card for quite a lot of money, and no other explanation for how the number got out into the world. I'm normally very, very careful with my credit card information, and I was furious with myself for leaving my wallet behind at work.
Anyway, I've since had to cancel my other card, because I don't want to take the chance that it was compromised as well. I'm hoping -- really, really hoping, that this is the end of the dodginess and fraud. On the bright side, I'm so poor that no one's going to be able to steal much from me anyway.

I guess the moral is: It Could Happen To You.