My wife and I have two cards for an account with a major credit card. Traveling recently, she'd made a purchase on that card that triggered texts and emails to me worrying about fraud. This really bugs me.

Don't ask me why they're asking ME, not her. They CAN tell the cards apart. They should have asked her directly. It'd have been even faster. Delay was due to asking the wrong person.

"Charge OK? Yep. OK, done." That's all it should have been.

I verified things with my wife and texted back to the card's SMS query that it was OK.

But even after I inefficiently confirmed all was well, upon going to the web site, I was again confronted with the Fraud Department wanting to confirm purchases that I had already, through their clumsy interface, dismissed as non-issues.

Also at the site, I saw that they were playing a back-and-forth thing where the vendor was repeatedly retrying apparent new transactions to get an affirmative response. Every vendor in the universe likely knows there's no other way to get past this than to keep trying.

Given how bad their internal bookkeeping is, that they don't know I've dismissed this alert, I kept wondering what the chances are that sometimes people just get double-billed. You'd like to think there was a consistent state, a database, a single source of authority with data integrity and a unique view, but then again, they're not showing evidence they're good at that.

And now today I got mail from their fraud department asking me about my experience and whether, based on that, I'd recommend the card to a friend.

It WASN'T an incident of fraud. It was confirmed normalcy. It should have been finished now. Having already wasted my time once, they want to waste it more?

And let's leave aside my annoyance at the fact that every business in the universe has converged on this practice which (a) assumes I make recommendations based on a single experience, and/or (b) seems to be trying to single out an agent for blame, rather than considering process.

I seriously doubt that feedback from these surveys ever reaches the people designing the offending processes because modern customer service seems to have as its bedrock principle that no one inside the company should ever learn what the customer experience is. It feels like the purpose of customer service is as armor to make sure that the business can really see, much less absorb, the vast amount of useful information that customers would willingly provide about just how bad their product is. I think this because the worst parts never change, no matter how many of these surveys I fill out.

Here's what I wrote today:

«Declining a valid charge is not the answer to fraud. You may feel hampered by existing protocols, but the credit card companies all have this problem and all profess helplessness. They/you own this problem.

The problem is that every time you decline a purchase, the person we're buying from can't tell the difference between a stolen card, someone who doesn't manage money right, and you just being nervous. Create a way to send an error code that distinguishes these. A temporary error that says "I'm querying the customer, please retry this transaction." or even a way to just ask a question before responding. It's completely preposterous that the correct solution to this problem is to leave egg on my face because you can't have rational network protocols that fairly represent the actual information that needs to be represented.

You're using outdated ways of doing things because you're too lazy to make a new standard, and you figure it's just fine if you sully the reputation of every customer every time they make a nervous-making transaction, that they'll be fine about it, that they won't mind the uncomfortable conversations, that they love to have email, text, etc. in a zillion different places for a single transaction, information that confusingly lingers after-the-fact an that is just clutter.

So you're asking me now whether I think that was a kind of fun experience that would make me recommend your card to someone else? Do you hear yourself? Did this question really need to be asked?

What you did does not instill confidence. It just makes a mess of a routine situation that should have a routine interaction, and there is nothing about this interaction that has the look of routine, other than that customers are used to getting dumped on big Big Credit and having to take whatever you dish out.»

After more multiple choice questions, they asked if I had any other comments to add. I did add some reminders about alert fatigue and how real problems are likely to slip through the cracks when they're doing these other things.

Is it any wonder that not all of us are reassured by billionaires taking over the US and saying "don't worry, we're good at this", "deregulate us", "run the US like a business"?