The Sneed family Christmas Eve party just broke up. I can tell you one thing for sure, the Hooterville cops have no sense of humor. Enough about Christmas though. You may recall that I recently wrote a post in praise of credit unions in general and mine in particular. While I still believe that credit unions are great, they are not perfect and can be downright bank-like in their moments of ineptness. My day started at about seven with a call from the fine folks at the Visa fraud monitoring unit letting me know that my debit card had been canceled because some criminals in Maryland had used it to make a $423 purchase at something called Food Lion. They also attempted a second charge of $425, which tipped off Visa that something was up. The Visa person said that they had blocked both bogus charges. Their advice was to contact my credit union and order a new card, which will take a week to reach me. Glad tomorrow isn't a major holiday requiring some last minute purchases or anything. Luckily, I have that sweet $22 in cash to tide me over until I can get to the branch on Friday. When the credit union opened at nine, I called and told them the story, as I understood it and asked for a new debit card. As it turns out, the local credit union folks were told by Visa back on the 19th of December that my card was among a bunch of cards that someone had 'compromised' though a merchant. Their solution was to order me a new card, but not tell me what was up. They claim they didn't want to inconvenience me. I would have canceled my card back on the 19th, but hey, what do I know about the world of high finance? Plus, they say that the original $423 was taken from my account and I should come right in and sign a fraud victim affidavit so that they can return my money to me. Oh, and it must be done within 10 days or I'm screwed. The representative suggested I come right in. No inconvenience there. If these jackasses had taken the time to tell me all of this back on the 19th, we could have avoided most of the inconvenience that they were trying to prevent. Oh yeah, when I went to the branch at one o'clock this afternoon on my lunch break, I discovered that they were closed early for Christmas Eve. That was really convenient and another good thing to have mentioned when they were urging me to come right in. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky