Ain't Technology Wonderful?........

I mean, when it works?

Sometimes I find myself cursing technology and wishing some things had never been invented, because they just make my blood pressure go up. Like when my iPhone arbitrarily shuts itself off and won't come back on. But then I use another wonderful piece of technology, namely Google, and I find out how to jump-start it again.

But that's not at all what this post is about.

Today I got one of those pesky, annoying "toll free" calls on the caller i.d., the ones I usually ignore and let go to the answering machine. Yes, we still have one of those, but it doesn't use a tape, so there.

I don't usually answer those calls because it's either the American Red Cross calling again, asking me for a donation of my rich O+ blood because it's the universal donor type. I don't understand why the folks who told me thanks but no thanks, I can't donate blood again until after April because I had the audacity to go to a malaria-risk country such as the Dominican Republic can't talk to the folks who man the phones and tell them to stop bugging me until after my year's penance is up.

Or it's the mortgage company where my ex's house is financed, wanting to know why I won't catch his payments up for him. I explain that I signed a quit claim deed to the house, and I have no legal claim on the house, and although I realize that it will shoot my credit to hell and back because he refuses to refinance the mortgage and get my name off of it (10% interest he's paying ... uh, I guess not paying), I have no intention of helping with his financial crisis. Which isn't really a financial crisis at all, just a terminal case of sorriness. I actually told the last person who called that my ex would never take her calls, would never return her calls, and probably had no intention of ever paying his mortgage again, and the best thing she could do was to foreclose on it. Oh yeah, and leave me the hell alone.

Or it's someone wanting me to answer a few questions for a survey, the subject of which I've never determined because I don't let them get that far.

Or it's the golf equipment company from whom Hubby has ordered a few times in the past, offering him three new irons (or woods or putters or drivers) for free if he will just give them a try. That's one way we wound up with 892 golf clubs in our basement.

I'm not sure why I answered the one today, or why I stayed on the line once I realized it was an automated caller. Nothing irritates me more than a toll-free call, unless it's a toll-free call that turns out to be a computer.

It got my attention when it said it was conducting a "fraud" alert on Sweet Girl's bank account. It asked me to verify the last five transactions on her checking account, and I felt pretty confident doing that, since I had just looked at her account online this morning. Our checking accounts are still linked because it makes it easier for me to keep up with her finances when she goes out to sea. It's also quite convenient to transfer money from my account to hers if the need arises. Which it doesn't very often.

I guess the fraud alert was triggered because she still banks with our little hometown bank here in Northeast Georgia and most of her transactions occur in Florida. Yesterday she and some girlfriends went to Savannah, so those transactions must have raised the little computer antennae.

It gave me great pleasure to know that some little gerbil running on a wheel inside a computer somewhere in the world is looking out for my girl.

This happened one time before, when she was on one of her two Persian Gulf cruises. That time I talked to an actual person. She called because a transaction had come through at 4:00 AM from Chicago in the amount of $3325. She declined it because of the amount and the time of day, and she called me. I laughed when she told me the amount, because it would have taken a whole lot of luck plus an act of God to get that much out of Sweet Girl's account anyway. But when she told me the name of the business, I recognized it as a place Sweet Girl had told me she and some friends had gone to eat when they ported in Dubai. (Why the transaction went through Chicago is beyond me.) I figured out that the amount of the transaction was incorrect because they had left out a little bitty decimal. By the time the transaction was declined, Sweet Girl and her friends were long gone, so I guess they ate for free at that establishment. The girl who called me was so proud of herself for declining it based on the time of day. I told her that when it was 4:00 AM here, it was noon in Dubai, so it wasn't that out of the ordinary at all.

She never DID understand that one. I'm not sure she knew where the Persian Gulf was.