My back, neck and shoulders were sore and tight when I woke up this morning. I imagined that I had been wrestling with demons - real and dream - in my sleep. Then I remembered the damn ice. The damn, damn ice. To add insult to injury, when I related my sad story to a friend at work, rather than making the appropriate sympathetic noises, and perhaps even throwing in a gratuitous "Why didn't your husband check to see that you had a better ice scraper in your car? Why didn't he drive you to the airport? Why didn't he pay for a limo service to pick you up and greet you with a glass of wine and a pair of slippers?", she laughed. Chortled even. Asked me if I hadn't thought about how funny the story would sound the next day while I was hacking at the ice and swearing like Churchill's parrot. When I mentioned it again to Caitlin today she asked when I was going to give it up and stop talking about it. No support, I tell you, no support at all.

When I was paying for having my hair cut today, one of my credit cards was rejected. I called the friendly bank card people, who answered in record time (I barely had a chance to enjoy Shania Twain's twang), and they transferred me to the security division. They read me the last few charges on the card, all of which seemed legitimate (carpeting, gifts from the art center, airline tickets from work, etc.) and all of which were for fairly large amounts of money. Except for three over the last three days, for $8.95, $1.00 and $1.00, all to somewhere called WPI iFriends (WPI can stand for Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which is one of our clients, but I doubted there was a tie-in anywhere).

I queried everyone in the household to see if some errant charges had been made to this place, but everyone denied knowing what it was (and since the kids don't have the credit card number, they hadn't really been suspects). The friendly bank card people told me I had been the victim of fraud and that they would have to cancel the card and send me a new one. Tracking down all the automatic payments to that card will be a pain, but worth it to prevent some little shithead from charging any more $1.00 visits to a sex chat room (which is what iFriends googles as).

So tell me this - if you steal someone's credit card, why do you use it for a total of $10.95 over three days? Don't you buy some big ticket item along with a ticket to Tahiti? This is similar to when my husband lost his wallet and whoever found the credit cards used them for $2 worth of gas and a small purchase at KMart. Where are the credit card thieves with the expensive tastes?

I suppose I could have denied that the carpeting I bought was mine (despite evidence underfoot to the contrary) and tried to have the charge credited, but that would have been wrong. Wouldn't it?