Innocent little white envelopes

It never ceases to amaze me how a perfectly harmonious life can be thrown into disarray in an instant.

A phone call in the middle of the night pulls you out of what was a peaceful sleep and sends you God only know where. A knock at the front door and you open it. There, standing right in front of you, is a police officer or deputy sheriff just doing their job. Trust me when I say they have nothing but bad news to tell you, and if it’s at night, it’s really bad news.

Thankfully, my tale of woe this time has nothing to do with a midnight phone call. I wasn’t surprised by a knock on the door – unless of course we’re talking about those two guys trying to sell plastic pine straw door to door.

Now who in their right mind is going to buy plastic pine straw? Even if it does come in four decorative colors and lasts forever, is it really a good investment?

But I digress. My long journey of sorrow starts with a little white envelope I received in the mail last week.

At our house, The Wife and I get tons of junk mail: credit card applications, free offers, discounts on dinner, five rooms of carpet cleaned for $29.99 and, yes, even coupons for a free bail of plastic pine straw. It piles up in the kitchen, the office is full of it, and on rare occasions some even finds its way to the trash, but junk mail does have some advantages.

Being eco-friendly, I shred the mail and use it as cat litter. Lucky last week I opened one of those innocent little white envelopes before sending it to the cat box. What I found inside sent my perfectly harmonious life into one heck of a tailspin that I haven’t pulled out of yet.

The letter was from my bank that stated that since I was seriously delinquent my line of credit and it had been closed. After reading the letter a second time, I started to laugh. Best friend Mitch had to be playing another practical joke; he’s such a jokester. He must have sent me the letter. Well, come to find out the jokes on me. To my surprise, the letter was real and my account was indeed closed.

The next day I went to the bank armed with a copy of my credit history from all three of the reporting agencies. For 30 years I’ve been with the same bank. For 30 years I’ve taken great pride in always paying my debts and never being late.

Surely the friendly folks at the bank would fix the misunderstanding; they would see that I’m not delinquent on anything – seriously or otherwise. Want to guess what happened? Read on, dear reader. This is where it gets really silly.

After a few phone calls, I was told that they would have to have written permission to pull my credit reports. This didn’t make sense because they hadn’t needed permission to look at it to find that I was delinquent in the first place — which again, I’m not.

I explained they didn’t need to pull them; I had brought them in with me. They were looking right at them. Nope, this wasn’t good enough; they needed a copy of their own. Still not believing what I was being told, I asked if they were in on the practical joke that Best Friend Mitch was playing.

The bank folks apologized for the mix-up, and denied any culpability with a practical joke, but my account would remain closed until they finished investigating.

Great, now I’m depending on the bank to fix what they messed up in the first place. That’s almost a smart as giving billions of dollars to banks to bail them out of the mess they themselves caused.

It’s been a week since I opened that innocent little white envelope, and, yes, my account is still closed. When it’ll be back open, your guess is as good as mine.

A mistaken identity or credit goof that’s not your fault is a hard thing to correct when you’re dealing with a mega bank.

In the meantime, I’ve vowed to open everything that comes in the mail delivered to our house. Except for The Wife’s Oprah magazine — it’s not junk mail, it’s not to be shredded, and if it is, a closed bank account will be the least of my worries.