You know someone made a staffing error when other employees begin racing each other to get parking spots in the back lot just so that they don’t have to go through the front doors and be forced talk to the receptionist.
I’ve been eying the Think Tank Photo line of Urban Disguise bags for quite some time now.
A while back, I bought a new camera bag to accommodate my new SLR, but the fit still isn’t quite right. It works, but it’s not ideal. It’s so bulky, and a little awkward. I could never find a way to justify laying out that much money for a camera bag, as the Think Tanks are not cheap, but with my lovely gift card I received from my employer I decided to take the leap (after doing a ton of reading and research on them of course) and buy one of the bags.
I got on the Think Tank website and tried to order it on Monday, using my American Express gift card. It denied my card, stating the billing address was incorrect. The message it gave me stated that my order WOULD NOT BE PROCESSED, and therefore, I assumed, my card not be charged.
I happened to know the card was actually mailed to my boss’s house, so I tried to run it with his address for billing, and it denied again, this time without a valid reason given but still stating no order was actually placed.
So I went to Amazon, and ordered the bag, AND a remote (YAY!) through a camera store selling through them. Amazon rejects the card. I update the billing address to be the address the card was sent to. It rejects again. I emailed customer service, who said the order still had my billing address on it, and customer service changed the address to my boss’s address. They said it should work, but to get back to them if it did not.
It did not. And I got back to them! And what I got for a response is basically that I was out of luck, because it denied for an unknown reason that time and there was nothing else they could do.
Bastiches.
I decided to use money out of my checking account to pay for the purchase and then use the card for expenses like gas and such to replace the money. I had already put a tank on there and a lunch one day (forgot my wallet at home that day, but had the gift card, ha!) so I hopped on American Express’s website to check my balance.
And there I see a charge from Think Tank.
Excuse me?
I called their customer service line, but they did not open until 9am Pacific Standard which would be 11am my time. I’m impatient, so I decided to email them instead and see; my email had no response come 2pm so I decided to call again.
The sweet chicky on the phone tells me that basically it places a temporary hold on the money that should release within a few days, and that they’ve experienced this before.
I said thanks, and let her off the hook, since I doubt there was anything she could do to make me happy in this situation, but my immediate thought was that, “Well, damn, if you can place a hold on my money so I can’t spend it anywhere else, why didn’t you just run the fucking charge fully and let me have my bag?”
>.<
Needless to say, I’m not a happy customer. At least that explains to me why it was probably denied at Amazon; the purchase I was trying to make there, plus the hold, is more than the balance of the card.
Okay. I’m done bitching. Thanks for reading. 
I think ENTIRELY too much.
It’s ridiculous.
I wish I could just shut it off.
My department recently completed the roll-out of a rather large, important project without any major hitches that were our fault, so my awesome boss went to the company and suggested we get a reward for all our hard work.
An American Express reward. For $250.
FREEEE MONEY!
Well… not really free… I worked for it… but it was a wonderful gesture by the company and I feel rather appreciated. It’s a nice, lovely feeling.
So, what am I going to do with this money, hmm?
Am I going to send it off as an extra car payment?
Shall I sock it into savings for the road trip I may be taking at the end of July? Or put it into my moving out funds?
Or should I buy camera accessories?
‘Cause there’s plenty of those I want. Yeah.
OH. The torture of such a decision! It’s going to drive me MAD!
I want to know why it is so common for people to push off blame on an assaulted woman and say it is somehow her fault at some level.
“She put herself in that situation.”
“She was asking for it.”
Yeah, because don’cha know, what all of us want is to be harassed, violated, and humiliated.
Tonight I was telling some friends about a story I was reading today about a University of Connecticut student who was assaulted by a man and then by a group of men after that.
Yes, she was walking basically alone down a sidewalk, at night, in a tube top. There were other people around, but none of whom she knew. She wasn’t able to drive herself anywhere because she’d been drinking.
Albeit, those are four small decisions she made that night that were not in her favor. I’d even go as far as to say it was dumb.
But to say, “Well, she put herself in that situation,” is not a response I can understand in any way.
I know such a world doesn’t exist, but women deserve a world in which they can walk down a sidewalk, tipsy and in a tube top, and not fear for their very safety; a world where you don’t have to hold your keys in your hand like weapons and pray no one decides to prey on you that night. Everyone– men, women, children, and their damn cats too– deserves that.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just too sensitive to be living in this world. People tell me I’ll jade to the horror stories, but it never seems to happen.
