A Learning Experience

I must agree with all the positive sentiments about the Convention this weekend. It was a truly upbuilding experience.

I was excited about getting a hotel room with my friend, taking care of the arrangements for those in my car, and being completely independent; it was refreshing. I have to admit that I felt a twinge of pride when nothing went wrong with the hotel rooms I booked. Upon checkout, I was gleeful that I'd seemingly taken care of matters so well. Seemingly.

I had a pretty horrible day at work yesterday. I was working for an attorney whose type of law I'm almost completely unfamiliar with, and I had a splitting headache that began aroung 10am and didn't end until 9pm that evening. During work, I MAC'ed out some cash for lunch at a no-name ATM in a gas station in Newton. I glanced at the balance after the withdrawl and it was about $300 lower than it should have been. However, being that my day was already so horrible, I let it slide, thinking it was simply an ATM error, or even that the ink on the receipt was wearing (the rest of the receipt was fuzzy). So I continued work and thought nothing of it.

Today I decided to send my insurance company a check for my balance this month. On intuition, I decided to call my bank first to check the amount in my account. To my incredible dismay, the nice customer service lady, Maria, listed my balance at that second at "$79.14". "What?" my reaction was. She repeated herself. "Is that incorrect?" she asked politely. "That is incredibly incorrect," was my response. I proceeded to tell her that that balance was about $350 lower than it should have been for that account. She informed me that the last withdrawl was made by the Ramada Plaza Hotel in Jamaica New York. My jaw dropped. I paid cash for my room, and I knew there should have been no charge to my card at all. Immediately I thought the worst and slightly implausible: that someone had stolen my card, charged it, then slipped it back into my wallet. I know, that's nuts, and it's not what happened. I called the hotel, and the accountant explained to me that they keep a hold on debit/credit cards for 7 days after check out. DID ANYONE KNOW THAT? He also told me that they immediately release holds on credit cards.

So, in my experience, don't hold a hotel room with your debit card. It's not worth it.