Yesterday was a Bad Day!!

Yesterday was one of those days where you wish you could just hit the reset button. Let's see, started ok, but quickly turned in to a disaster. We have had a lot of fraudulent activity with our accounts, since our credit report was stolen from a mortgage lender credit check service when we got pre-qualified for a home loan about 18 months ago. Since then it has been a non-stop battle to keep identity theft at bay.

Well, our Best Buy account was one of the 5 accounts effected and we have had a lot of problems mitigating the account since then. We no longer use the account, but we still maintain a balance because we purchased quite a few major appliances from there. We have had our account number changed several times which doesn't do a bit of good protecting us because they stole our credit info with our SSN's. All they have to do is run another credit report and they will have the new account number. Anyway, Mark had a phone call at work yesterday saying our account was in collection. It is an account I maintain, so he called me and told me to handle it. I knew this wasn't possible because I had just made a large payment at the beginning of the month. I called customer service immediately, and just as I had said, the account was up to date, no payment due. I kept hitting 0 until it transferred me to customer service. At that point, I was transferred to a woman who barely spoke English. I realize that most customer service centers have been transferred over seas because labor is cheaper, which I realize it helps them out with jobs, but c'mon!! This woman barely spoke English and she is dealing with people that are usually already upset, not only from going through the useless automated menus, but from the problem they are calling with to begin with. Then you have to speak to someone that is worse at understanding them than the AI automated menu!!!

After 35 minutes of telling her exactly what I thought the problem was, her every two second reminder of "just a moment while I review your account", which I am guessing she kept telling me because she thought my English was as bad as her's, and two times of being placed on hold, I was finally transferred to a supervisor because it was just to complicated for the lady I was talking to. She told me that 'the account was in collection because I had fraud and that I should pay closer attention to my statements with my Best Buy account.' WTF????? First of all, I have paperless billing, which pretty much tells me to log in to see the statement. Well, with a freeze on the account and me only making payments, why do I need to look at a statement?? I pay the bill when I get the email reminder and I usually get a "Thank you for your Payment" a couple days later, so why would I have any reason to suspect there was a problem??

Anyway, I got transferred to the supervisor and we figured out the problem (well, I told him what I thought the problem was and he verified). Our payments were being made to the old account (they changed our account number about 4x's from the fraud). So, he transferred all the payments I had been making to the new account and removed all the late fees. He also said he would send a letter to the credit agencies to fix the 30 day late notices. It got taken care of, but it was an extremely frustrating process.

By that point, we just had enough time to eat some lunch and head to pick up Ethan. Javi was at home with me because his lip was still really swollen. We made plans to go get some ice cream after picking up Ethan from school. We pulled up to the ice cream place. The lot there is pretty tight. I was trying to be nice by letting the car in the adjacent row out before I tried to park my monstrous SUV. Well, I was a little cockeyed half way in a parking space and I had checked my rear and was staring in my rear view as I was backing out, but there was a Mercedes in my blind spot and I backed right in to him. It was totally my fault because he was in my blind spot and I was in motion. There wasn't much I could have done about it. It was just bad timing. He came around the corner just after I had checked my blind spot. The kids were going nuts yelling "what happened?". Javi is hanging out the window yelling and I am frantically looking for my insurance card. The gentleman I hit was very nice, so we just exchanged insurance and left.

Well, that was a $500 mistake!! Needless to say, yesterday was just one of those days!! There are many of those days when you have SN children, but this was above and beyond the usual. Kids were in complete meltdown when we had to leave the yogurt place empty handed, which added fuel to the fire. I was ready to just give up and go home and go to bed, but we persevered. We went to the park so I could deal with the insurance and keep the kids occupied then we went to the McDonald's drive thru for a sundae. Ended on a sweet note and kids were happy, so what more could I ask for?