CREDIT CARD THEFT FATIGUE

There are still repercussions from enduring the theft of my credit card number back in July.  Sixty days ago.  Two months.  UGH. 

Remember when bills came in an envelope? A real envelope. With a stamp, a return envelope, and sometimes even a cheery insert trying to upsell you a second phone line or an encyclopedia set? You wrote a check, licked the flap, and felt the deep satisfaction of done.  Those were the days.

Fast-forward to now. Every “bill” is buried inside an email or an app, with logins, two-factor authentication, and dropdown menus that look like a video game. Instead of a sense of closure, I'm still getting a glowing red banner:  “There was an issue with your recent payment that will impact your insurance coverage. Your payment of $1,616.30 scheduled for 9/12/2025 was declined by your financial institution.”

Well, excuse me. I’m not trying to run from the mob here — just paying my insurance premium. But the way these systems word it, you’d think I was laundering money through an offshore account.  Every day charges were easy to upgrade to the new number, expiration date and secret code.  But some are things I pay less frequently.

And here’s the kicker: back in the envelope days, if a check bounced (rare, but it happened), the bank politely mailed you a notice on heavy paper stock. Now, it’s all caps and exclamation points, as though I need to be marched down to the Fraud Department in handcuffs.

Meanwhile, the subscriptions I didn’t ask for renew quietly in the background: a streaming service I watched free for a week last spring and missed the cancel date by 3 hours so I had to pay for a whole month.  (Silver lining in this one, they lured me back with a half price membership if I signed up for a year!  Yea BritBox!) 

Maybe the fatigue isn’t just about money. It’s about the constant management. A lifetime of collecting stamps, licking envelopes, and trusting the U.S. Mail trained us to believe payment was an act of closure. Now it feels like a full-time job: monitoring apps, double-checking logins, and proving to robots that I’m not a robot.  Not the end of the world, for sure, but annoying anyway.

Still, I keep plugging away, because that’s what grown-ups do. But every time I get another “issue with your recent payment” message, I want to dig out my old checkbook, write the number in perfect cursive, and send it off with a 20-cent stamp. Just to show them who’s boss.