The All-Purpose Pretext

Since we moved here, I noticed that even though I had changed the billing address on my Amer­i­can credit cards, my state­ments for some of them were con­sis­tently too late to be able to pay them on time. I phoned cus­tomer ser­vice for one of them, MBNA, and after some dis­cus­sions about pos­si­ble ways of fix­ing this, they admit­ted that they couldn’t help me yet, but the rep­re­sen­ta­tive encour­aged me to check my bal­ance online peri­od­i­cally and at some point in the future, to con­tact cus­tomer ser­vice again to see if they could get what I wanted. What I wanted was to get my state­ment via email (or at least, an email to be sent when the state­ment was read­able), the way I get with my Invest­ment accounts. Since this par­tic­u­lar credit card was even con­nected to my Invest­ment accounts (that’s where the bonuses for using the card go), it seemed pos­si­ble that maybe they might do this in the near future.

That was 6 months ago or so. After get­ting my state­ment for this past month late once more, I decided to give MBNA a call. The ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive had a south­ern accent. That wasn’t all that sur­pris­ing. What I wasn’t pre­pared for was a full dose of unabashed Amer­i­can propaganda:

Me: (after the usual account exchange of secu­rity and account num­ber infor­ma­tion) Hello, I’ve been con­tin­u­ing to get my state­ment too late to be able to pay it. I know that I’m in Canada, but is there any way that you could send the state­ments ear­lier or send an email noti­fy­ing me of them?

Ser­vice Rep: Oh yeah, we’ve had a lot of trou­ble recently get­tin’ state­ments to peo­ple OUT­side the US because of the guv-ment. They now have to check all of these statements.

Me (gasp­ing in aston­ish­ment): You’ve got to be kidding.

Ser­vice Rep: Oh no, not at all. This is nec­es­sary, after what those ter­ror­ists did down here. You watch the news, dontcha?
Me: Are you telling me that I have no choice, that this is the US gov­ern­ment who are hold­ing up your statements?

SR: I told you, to peo­ple in other coun­tries, you’ll be get­tin’ your state­ments late from now on. It’s a new pro­ce­dure. If you want to talk your Sen­a­tor about this, you can do that, but there’s nothin’ we can do.

Me: Can’t you just send the state­ments out a lit­tle ear­lier to make up for this?

SR: Sir, we send those state­ments as soon as we can already. The guv-ment just has to do this to keep us all safe. I’m sure you under­stand that.

Me: I can’t believe this. No one told me about this months ago. Is there some­one else I can talk to about this?

SR: You’re talkin’ to me. Now I sug­gest you check your state­ment online, which you can eas­ily do from www…

Me: (break­ing in) I do that already, I really just want you to send me the state­ments ear­lier or send an email so I’ll know when to check…

SR: We won’t do that. That’s jus’ some­thing we don’t do.

Me: OK, that’s it. I’ve had it. Please can­cel the account.

SR: (almost relieved): I’ll be happy to do that, sir.

It didn’t go much longer beyond that. I think at some point I almost heard her mut­ter some­thing about for’inners.

At any rate, I believe I’ve learned some­thing. The behav­ior of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion is now being imi­tated every­where, even by the Pri­vate Sec­tor: When you find your­self at odds with your customer/citizenry, blame the idea of Ter­ror­ism. The Bush gov­ern­ment has lit­er­ally got­ten away with mur­der and may­hem by using the umbrella expla­na­tion of “9/11 Changed Every­thing”. The rights of Pris­on­ers of War, the right to a Free Press, the pri­vacy of phone con­ver­sa­tions, med­ical records or finan­cial trans­ac­tions; every­thing is up for grabs under the “We have to fight the Ter­ror­ists.” excuse. I didn’t think I’d be hear­ing that par­tic­u­lar spiel recited to me from a credit card com­pany like MBNA, but I guess this is a game that any­one can play. So, if you get lousy ser­vice or a shoddy prod­uct from some Amer­i­can com­pany, don’t be sur­prised if they pull out the ulti­mate ‘Get out of Jail Free Card’ that has the num­ber 9 and 11 on it.