Finances
There's been two bad things to happen to us this month concerning our finances. The first happened on my 13th wedding anniversary, but I didn't learn about it until the next day. I logged into my email account to find that several charges had been made to my paypal account using my debit card. I only had about $86 in that account, but the charges were over $300. I immediately contacted paypal, my bank, and the companies where these charges were made. The good thing is that my bank was basically in a temporary hold situation because there's been no activity on my account in about a year. The paypal folks were great in handling this situation. They immediately responded, contacted the folks where the fraudulent charges took place, and refunded the money to me. A lot of people don't like online banking companies like paypal, but I've been using them for about 8-9 years and this is the first time I've had an issue. I'm really pleased with the way this turned out.
The second situation happened yesterday. We jumped on our e-bikes and were supposed to go out to lunch. On the way, I wanted to stop at the bank to get some money since I only had about 4 yuan in my pocket. We forgot to stop at the bank and didn't remember until we were outside of the restaurant. Colonel and the kids decided to go in and order the food while I drove back to the atm to get some money to pay for that food.
There was no line at the atm. I walked right up and used it. Everything was going like normal and I withdrew some money. Then the atm printed up a red receipt that was all in Chinese and gave me an error message on the screen. I put my card in and noticed that the atm was showing the amount of money I tried to withdraw was missing from my final balance. Basically, the atm gave me no money but still withdrew the money from my final balance.
I rushed inside the atm, showed a bank worker the red receipt. She asked me a bunch in questions that I could just barely understand and few that I couldn't. I point at the receipt, showed her the amount on the receipt and said "Mei you." That means that I don't have the money. She immediately helped me with the situation. Told me the atm was wrong. Wrote down a bunch of info and sent me on my way. I went back to the atm and it still showed the same problem, so I addressed the the worker again. I thought I understood her, but just to be sure, I called my Chinese friend Allen. She talked with the bank worker over the phone and translated for me. It seems that I may have this money refunded to me in 5 days. It's funny how banks can make errors that take place immediately, but they can't seem to fix those errors immediately. So, in five days, I'll return to the atm to see if the money was replaced in my account.
Unfortunately, I still didn't have the money to pay for our food and lunch time was almost over by this point. I returned to the atm, but used the one next to it just in case. I had a little trepidation as I put my card into the new atm, but I needed the money. I was relieved when it actually worked.
My life lesson for the day was to not place so much faith in the accepted order of things in society. When a new technology first comes out, people are leery of it, but eventually accept it as commonplace. We begin to depend on things working a certain way, and our children grow up thinking there's never been any other way. We all become ultra complacent. Things rarely seem to go wrong, but when they do, it can be eye-opening. So, my eyes were a bit opened with these last two situations. It's strange to me that they happened about a week apart from each other, but I'm thankful that we still had money to take care of life's necessities while the banks and other folks are trying to deal with the issues presented by modern day technology.