Worse Than Being On Hold

Dearest Rachel –

So, in an effort to keep you up-to-date with thing happening in my life, no matter how mundane (especially since the stuff that isn’t mundane is rather depressing at the moment. Like funereal depressing, literally), I have to let you know that there are in fact ordinary things in life worse than being on hold. It may seem counterintuitive, but actually getting ahold of someone can be, believe it or not. You’re probably assuming that this assertion comes from painful experience, and you’d be right; from there, you’d be wondering what that experience might be. So here it is, and brace yourselves.

It so happened that Mom had gotten a letter from a credit card company about a suspicious transaction on Dad’s card last week. Yes, last week; the letter was literally dated the day he died (I seem to be using the word ‘literally’ a lot, don’t I? At least you’d be able to vouch for the fact that I’m at least using it in the correct context). There had been several transactions that were considered by the company to be unusual, and they wanted confirmation that they were in fact legitimate.

A reasonable request, but how to do it? I decided to set the card up for online inquiry, to make the process that much easier, and after some fiddling around, managed to access the most recent transactions they were asking about. As far as I could tell, only one looked truly unusual – the other two were merely gas purchases – which was a gift card that Dad had talked about getting for someone at about the time that he last fell ill, over a month ago. As far as I could tell – and once I got Mom over to look at the questionable transactions herself, she verified it – everything was on the up-and-up, and so theoretically, all I would need to do was to click the correct buttons on the screen to do just that.

Only, when I did that, I received an error message telling me that the card was blocked. Presumably, we had waited too long to confirm the transactions, and in the meantime, the card had been unilaterally cancelled by the issuing bank. Considering that Dad wasn’t going to be using the card going forward, this wasn’t really a big deal in and of itself, but these transactions still needed to be processed and paid, so I called the number shown on the “Account Blocked” screen.

This proved to be easier said than done, as I was put on hold before being kicked off the line due to a bad connection. But eventually – and honestly, I don’t know what happened differently between attempts – that part of the situation got resolved, and I got ahold of someone to speak with directly about the legitimacy of these transactions.

The problem was that, it order to properly confirm them, the individual on the other end of the line wanted to speak with the cardholder directly, rather than myself, or even Mom. When I informed them that this would be impossible barring a seance (and even if those things worked, I have a hard time believing that Dad’s spirit would pay any mind to such a summoning; in fact, I dare say he would ignore it on general principle), they responded that, in that case, both Dad’s and Mom’s cards would be immediately canceled; Dad’s because of his death (understandable, although they did assure me that, at our affirmation, the questionable transactions would still be processed and included on the closing bill for the account), and Mom’s because hers was a secondary card to Dad’s account. She would need to apply for her own card, in order to maintain continuity.

Again, this seemed like a reasonable requirement, and with Mom at my side to add her voice to the conversation (and me holding the phone up to her ear to hear what each individual on the line was saying in terms of instructions), we agreed to have her apply for a new card under her name. At this point, we were put back on hold, because “problem resolution” is a different department from “applications,” naturally, and we needed to be transferred from one to the other.

It’s at this point that, after another fifteen minutes of ‘hold’ music that always leaves one wondering if and when the call will be dropped, requiring the entire process to be started over from the beginning, ‘Anna’ came on the line, and we explained the situation to her. At first, she seemed helpful and more than willing to get Mom signed up for this new credit card, but first, she had to explain to the two of us the benefits of the card that, until a few moments ago Mom already had. I did try to stop Anna with her schpiel, reminding her that we already had the card, but she insisted that certain benefits may have changed since my folks had originally applied for the card back in the day, and she needed to go over every last one of them before signing Mom up again.

I took this to mean that this was a requirement of her job, and I let her go on because of it. But it did start to wear on me as I continued to hold the phone up to Mom’s ear in order to hear all this. For her part, even Mom was getting impatient; all she wanted to use this card for was to buy gas every now and again, and shop at the warehouse store with whom this card was connected. Most of the benefits were pretty much as she remembered, too, and neither of us could spot the differences; couldn’t Anna just skip a bit, and get on with the actual application process?

Finally, she did, and started quizzing us on Mom’s particulars. I would answer the questions, and Anna would insist that Mom speak for herself; I never thought until now how one’s near-deafness might sound to a stranger on the other end of a phone line very much like senility, and that I was pressing Mom to sign up for something she might not have wanted in the first place. And we had some difficulty coming up with an income figure, too; I knew that Dad had been required to withdraw a certain amount from his retirement account every year, but didn’t know the amount, and neither did Mom. Eventually, I suggested that we use a nice round number that was doubtless lower than reality, just to have one to use as reference. It wasn’t as if she needed the credit limit to be as high as all that, anyway.

So just about everything was squared away, but for the last three or four questions – I began to lose track – Anna read to us what seemed to be whole paragraphs of legalese about rates, delinquencies and all sorts of other stuff before getting to the summing-up question of “do you agree to these terms and conditions?” by which time most of what she had rattled off had already been forgotten. Both Mom and I tried once again to get her to skip a bit and actually get to the question, but once again, she insisted that she was required to read everything to us, and proceeded to pick up right where she had left off as if nothing had happened.

Again, I can’t begrudge her from fulfilling the requirements of her job, and it’s true that folks like Mom and myself don’t bother to read the fine print on a contract such as this. Under certain circumstances (although I can’t imagine what said circumstances might be), this would be rather refreshing that a company wanted to make sure that its customers were aware of everything they needed to know before signing up to do business with them. However, the fact of the matter was that listening to all of this, when Mom was only going to use the card for a handful of transactions in any given month – and pay it off at the end of said month – seemed like a torturous ordeal to go through before signing up for a ‘new’ card that she’d already had, and had been using for years. This company meant well, but it felt like they wanted us to hang up and give up on the procedure; didn’t they want our business?

It took the better part of an hour before everything was taken care of, and I understand that Mom will get her card in a matter of no more than two weeks, but oh my goodness, I really don’t want to have to deal with something like that again. I think that, in future, I’m going to have to insist that any credit card enrollments take place online. I know my parents’ generation preferred to deal with actual people for things like this, but these companies are doing their level best to make personal interactions as irritating as possible.

Of course, for all I know, maybe that’s the point; “Let them use the internet.”

Anyway, it’s over and done with; Mom was grateful for my help, and proud of my patience in dealing with Anna, and all’s well that ends well, as they say. But man, that was just another case of how awful personal interaction has gotten over time. I don’t know if it’s a shame Dad isn’t around for me to point out this fact to him; I’m sure he would have handled it better than I, and probably still wouldn’t have understood my impatience.

For now, though, I appreciate it if you’d continue to keep an eye on me, and wish me well, honey, as I expect I’ll still need it.