Day 214 – One fraud claim + one couch warranty + one medical insurance bill = two complete lottery failures

During my travels I accumulated several problems that I had to deal with back in New York:

1. Capital One couldn't figure out how to compensate me for the thousand bucks stolen from my credit card on a Bloomingdale's purchase somewhere in Florida. For some reason it was absolutely impossible for them to email or fax a fraud claim for me to fill out – apparently, these important papers can only be mailed to you. They also have what they call a "grace period of the claim", 60 days within which you have to file it, otherwise you can forget about any reimbursement. Of course, I came home approximately 90 days after my credit card was compromised. The kicker to this annoying situation is that the claim was never sent to my home address anyway, although I requested it at least three times during my multiple remote attempts to straighten things out. Interestingly enough, none of those attempts were "in the bank's system", whatever that means. So I went to the bank to deal with this crap in person. One hour later, utterly frustrated by our most useless conversation – "Mam, this is impossible that the papers haven't been sent to you" – "But I didn't get them" – "But it's impossible" – "But I still didn't get them" – "But that's impossible", – I finally managed to make them file the claim through their system. Right away I started mourning the loss of this thousand stolen dollars, so confident the lady at the bank was when she sympathetically said to me, "I am really sorry it has happened to you, but we can only put the facts in the claim and the facts are it has now been 90 days since the money was spent and we have no record of any of your calls anyway, so I'm fairly sure your claim will be denied". Brilliant…
   
   
2. I got a phone call from my dermatologist's office informing me that my insurance didn't cover my last visit and I owe them $1,500. Reason "unknown". Now I have to call the stupid insurance, figure out what went wrong and try to convince them to pay a bill that was supposed to have been paid almost a year ago. Great…
   
   
3. Seven years ago I got the best couch on this planet at Macy's. It came with the best warranty invention also: you can spill anything on it – food, wine, blood, candle wax, a bucket of paint – they guarantee cleaning it, and if they fail, they replace the damaged part and/or the entire couch. This goodness is extended for seven years. Of course, over the years some stuff has been spilled in the direction of the couch, nothing major, but since my super-warranty expires in October, I decided to file a claim for replacing the cushion covers. It was back in January. For the past 7 months we have been conversing regularly with the warranty department on the subject of them not having the sales receipt from the original purchase. From my part, I did everything I could to get the stupid sales receipt to them: first I faxed it – no luck, they couldn't read it, fair enough because after 7 years it did fade quite a bit; then I mailed it (regular mail) – they "didn't receive it"; so I mailed it again (priority mail now) – they "didn't receive it", although I did get a notification from the post office that it had been delivered. This exchange started to become quite ridiculous and since the damage to my beloved couch was truly minor, I decided to give up on this endeavor and just let the warranty expire without taking any advantage of it. A sad waste of time…
   

I hate being on hold and resolving the above would involve a lot of holding time, so I kept postponing the calls… until one day when I decided to finally plunge into the first round of battling the system. I had no doubt that there would be multiple rounds to the process. But – OH MIRACLE! – every call was a complete success: the stolen money has just been returned to my account, the dermatologist's unpaid bill suddenly got paid, and the funniest of them all, Macy's decided to replace the entire couch (that didn't happen though because they don't have the same model anymore, so I settled for… a lump sum payment of $400!). What unbelievable streak of luck! I just had to buy a lottery ticket immediately!

And what a sore disappointment: out of 30 numbers on the ticket I didn't even guess ONE correctly! What kind of luck is that??? Out of sheer desperation I bought another ticket, and – struck of genius! – filled it out with… THE SAME numbers in each of the five rows. I must have thought that asserting the numbers in every row should somehow entice the luck fairy take my side. No comment…