Adventures In Spending My Own Damn Money

With my tax returns being on their way (the refunds should be direct deposited any day now) I decided that some of the money is going toward building me a home theater PC, including internal Blu-Ray drive. As with most of my computer purchases, I hit up the great Newegg. I made my order during a period of a couple of hours when work was slow, finally. A little while later I get an email notice saying that my credit card was declined. I went looking at my order and found that I had typed in my zip code as 14550 instead of 14450. So I contacted Newegg and had them change the data in my order and resubmit. Some time passes and I get the same email again informing me that my card was declined... again.

Alright, so I'm irritated at this point, but not pissed yet. When I got home from the gym I called the number on the back of the credit card thinking, "I'm gonna get my customer service on!". The automated message relays three purchases to me and asks if I recognize and authorize them. Two were Microsoft points purchases I had made and one was the computer. I pressed the "Authorize my fucking purchases already" button, then contacted Newegg a while later to have them run my card again.

OK, so once again the card gets declined. The email about this was received while I was in Best Buy. I just stood there incredulous in the aisle. People around me probably thought something weird was going on. Now, keep in mind that this is NOT the first time I have made a large random purchase on this card. As I was standing there trying to keep myself from breaking something I got a call from the card company. A very pleasant sounding you woman named Julie called from their fraud department. She was very sweet and apologetic about the whole thing and said that she told the system to allow my shit to go down. I thanked her and refrained from breaking Best Buy's precious merchandise. I got home, contacted Newegg AGAIN, and had them rerun the card.

Any guesses where this is going...? Declined! Fuck this shit! I went to Newegg, canceled the order and reordered with my debit card. So much for getting points on my credit card, I guess. Now I know that they've got algorithms that look at spending habits and try to spot fraud, probably some kind of genetic algorithm or a simple neural network algorithm, but haven't they seen my buy a $1400 TV, a $400 receiver, and an $1800 sound system within the last year? Honestly! They need to train the algorithms better, or get better programmers. And when you tell me that I'm authorized to make my purchases, I damn sure better be able to make my purchases! I'm probably going to fire off an angry letter to their customer (dis)service department and let them know that if that happens again I'll go to a direct competitor.