I had a problem with a credit card, earlier (a technical glitch on a modem apparently freaked out the bank’s anti-fraud system). So, I had to call the customer service number. “Cynthia,” whom I am pretty sure was in Mumbai or some such place and who barely speaks any English, proceeded to explain that there was a “temporary authorization pending release hold.” Now, I’m fairly familiar with credit card jargon from dealing with cards in my businesses, but I had no clue what that meant. I had to ask her five or six times whether or not I was going to be charged for purchases that were not, in fact, completed. Hopefully not, but I’m still not convinced.

Whatever one thinks of globalization, it is just not okay to outsource the handling of my sensitive financial data to people who cannot even communicate to me whether or not I’m being charged for incomplete transactions. I can’t say I’m terribly comfortable with the fact that my SSN and credit information are floating around in numerous underdeveloped countries, either.

Edit: What made this worse was that there was no one story for what had happened. Basically, about a dozen random combinations of the words release, authorization, funds, hold, temporary, pending, etc., were used to describe my plight. “Cynthia” also told me several times that the charge would or would not be applied. It looks like I was not charged, but the conversation is no less ridiculous as a result.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Miscellanea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.