A few days ago, we received a voicemail from the fearsomely named “Home Depot Consumer Credit Relations Department”. Please call us back on an urgent matter, said the message.
I already knew what it was about. A few weeks previous, a quartet of bills to pay had turned up on my desk in a pile that had been unexplored for some time. (I’d offer, “You have to see my desk”, by way of explanation but trust me, you really don’t want to do that.) Anyway, one of these was a Home Depot bill and because I’d let it languish, we had missed the “Minimum payment due by” date. (We had just sent off payment in full but, obviously, they called before they received it.)
Now I have (actually “had”; read on) a credit limit at Home Depot of $500. I only have a Home Depot card because one day when we were at the store wheeling some $350 worth of stuff through the cash they had a special promotion that took 10% off your purchase if you applied on the spot for a Home Depot credit card. $35 is nothing to sneeze at, so we went for it and were told our credit limit would be $500.
So, in response to the call, I phoned the credit relations folks and advised them of the mix-up on our part – even apologizing for same. Plus I gave them the news that payment – in full – was on its way, if it hadn’t already been received. No problem, said the cheery phone worker, who thanked me and went on his way to harass the next deadbeat on his list.
The very next day… The. Very. Next. Day. I opened a letter from Home Depot to read a 36-point bold headline: “Congratulations [My name here], your credit limit has been increased to $9,000!” (The exclamation point is, in fact, theirs.)
That’s less than 24 hours after they had conveyed to me their concern about my apparent inability to meet the previous month’s demand for a minimum monthly payment. (And obviously their letter had to have been written and mailed even before then.) A 17-fold increase in my credit limit!
Never one to resist the opportunity for a little snarking, I immediately sent a letter to the Credit Relations Department telling them that, in view of their obvious worry about my apparent inability to meet the minimum monthly payment on a credit line with a $500 ceiling, I simply could not bring myself to accept risking their even greater trauma were I to repeat the oversight on an account with a limit 17 times greater. I ended by requesting an immediate reduction of the increase in my limit to a total of $1,000.
There is a serious, more practical side to this. A friend not so long ago has his wallet stolen and, within hours, the thief had tried to use one of his stolen credit cards in an attempt to purchase a big-screen television at a local Best-Buy. (The would-be home theatre builder had also run out the door when told the card needed to be checked, and made his escape. But he bolted from the parking lot in a van painted in large letters with the name of the company he worked for; apparently it was the only vehicle he could get his hands on that was large enough to cart off a big-screen TV. He is now awaiting sentencing. He is also a complete idiot who deserves pride of place on an upcoming Jay Leno “Stupid Criminals” Headlines segment. But I digress.)
Even when you’re the victim of credit-card fraud, the hoops you have to jump through to undo it are enormously time-consuming. By fixing lower limits on your store cards, you can reduce their attraction to thieves who swiftly find out that risking arrest for no more than the ability to purchase a standard home computer just isn’t worth it.
But what really bugs me about Home Depot’s congratulatory message is not only the simple fact of the massive increase in credit from $500 to $9,000 (???? What in hell do they think we earn to suggest that running up an amount like that in just one store’s credit line is something we can do?), it is also the fact that it was entirely unsolicited. It’s not like I suddenly decided I wanted to build a new wing on the family mansion and requested a credit line that would comfortably pay for the building materials after a mere half-dozen or so maximum limit purchases. It’s not even like we recently wanted to buy on credit something whose price exceeded our credit ceiling.
And despite being once more in the happy position of having cleared off our account in full, I nonetheless have no doubt whatsoever that we are now red-flagged in their file with a code that reflects a missed minimum payment. Yet still they responded by gratuitously whacking our limit up by 17 times its original ceiling.
So if you’re chatting over the family dinner table one evening about why global credit card interest is so high (it could happen), it seems it’s my fault.
Sorry about that.
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Apparently I am the first person on the face of the earth to have ordered a CanWood Erika 2 loft / bunk bed ladder and side rail kit without actually having purchased the bed itself.
And thereby, you will not be surprised to hear, hangs a tale.
Several weeks ago, I built a combination loft bed / computer desk in a downstairs space that eventually will become offspring’s bedroom if everything works out. The size of the room is such that the length of the elevated bed spans the width of the room, which enables its head and foot to rest on wall-anchored ledger boards. However, that span is also just shy of ten feet long, considerably longer than standard bed kits (with the possible exception of those intended for sale in markets frequented by Africa’s Masai tribe).
And while I could have built an angled ladder and added home-made side rails, since both would be accent touches I thought why not find some product already nicely finished? By professionals, trained in the art of slathering on four coats of satin urethane. And the Erika 2 bed, it turns out, is not only a beautifully finished product overall, its ladder and side rails are available for separate purchase for a laughably reasonable price less than the cost of the materials alone that I would have had to buy, never mind the dollar value of my time to cut, sand, assemble and finish them. So I went to Sears to see what one looked like in its assembled state, and was more than happy. By a most serendipitous coincidence, its height was almost exactly suited to my home-built bed frame. (If you’d appreciate a visual distraction at this moment, here is the Erika 2 in loft bed / computer desk configuration, as Sears sells it. The assembled ladder and side rail kit is visible in the photo as, well, a ladder and side rails.):
After waiting several weeks, I finally received word from Sears that the kit had arrived. It came in a tightly packed box roughly the same dimensions as a small diving board. When I opened it, however, I also noticed immediately that it included a blister pack stuffed with an astonishing array of bolts, nuts, and completely mysterious threaded little things whose collective purpose defied my best guess. No matter, I concluded, all this will be made clear by the… instructions?
After I emptied the box of its beautifully finished wood, hardware bag and packing fillers, all that remained was a single sheet of paper that featured a sketch of the finished ladder and side rails, with the caption, “For assembly instructions, refer to the appropriate page in the instructions for assembling the Erika 2 loft or bunk bed”.
In other words, Sears plainly has assumed that no one would ever order only the ladder and side rails without having ordered the entire bed kit, and quite possibly the matching dresser, toy box and various other elements of the Erika 2 line.
Anyway, to end your pain, I will tell you that you will be delighted, as I was, to hear that CanWood – a company based in Penticton, British Columbia – has come through. When I finally got to speak to a real person after unsuccessful e-efforts to contact them, she regretfully informed me that they had no electronic version of the required instructions, but she would be only to happy to photocopy and mail the relevant section of the entire package of Erika 2 instructions (which, it turns out, is a book).
That evening, I interrupted our family dinner conversation about why global credit card interest rates are so high and quietly muttered about what I said was the stupidity of selling a separate component without providing separate assembly instructions. I suggested one possible alternative might be to include the full instructions with the ladder and side rail kit. To me, it was obvious from their omitting the instructions in the ladder kit's packaging that almost everyone orders the entire bunk or loft bed package. But by putting the instructions in the ladder / side rail kit box, CanWood would ensure that buyers of the full Erika 2 package also have what they need – requiring them only to open the ladder / side rails kit box. And those of us (so far, just me, I guess) who purchase it alone would also have the assembly guide.
My daughter, who plainly has a tolerance level she sure didn’t get from me, then asked, “But what about people who only want to buy the bed kit and not the ladder kit? Maybe they’re replacing a damaged bed and are perfectly happy with the ladder and rails they already have.” So dinner promptly became a discussion about which was the likelier outcome.
I lost. You’ll find that verdict in the Complete Dad Instruction Manual under “So what else is new?”
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And finally, here’s a sort of re-assuring note for all of us “For Better or For Worse” fans. It turns out that Grandpa Jim didn’t die in the recent strip where he was found comatose at the nursing home. Nope. He just had a severe stroke that, at this writing, has utterly incapacitated him. So don’t… um, worry. It looks like a funeral, if it is in the cards, won’t be dealt to us readers for some time to come. In the meantime, we can smack the breakfast table with side-splitting mirth and hilarity as the family comes together to grapple with the sudden imposition of an unconscious and unresponsive father / husband / grandfather into their lives. Relevant? Well sure. This, after all, is happening ever more often these days to many families in this age of longer lives and more and more older baby-boomers’ succumbing belatedly to the combined effects of a couple decades’ worth of narcotic and hallucinogenic experimentation that began in the 1960s, since amplified by expanding family budgets that allow for the regular ingestion of really fine single-malt scotch, tequila and fine wines. Some of us, I fear, are well down the road to a single-digit brain-cell inventory. I can almost just about (OK, maybe not) hardly wait until the strip goes for the real knee-slapper series when the whole family has an hilarious prolonged debate over whether to take Grandpa Jim off life support. For Better or For Worse. Putting the “Augh!” in laugh.
Until next time…
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