Just a Senior Moment
A cautionary tale from Swaffham Prior
ONE night, on the High Street, some time before light, a car window was smashed. At about eight, the owner discovered it. Vandals were obviously the culprits, high jinks on the way home perhaps. Who could know for sure? Wellmeaning, kindly neighbours were helpful and sympathetic, police and insurance were notified, a new window ordered, the pavement swept. Breakfast seemed to take forever. Then the phone rang.
It was John Lewis. "Have you been to Halfords in Coventry today and paid for items totalling £380 with a John Lewis partnership card?" There was laughter as I explained that I'd never actually been to Coventry and, anyway, I had the card in my bag. "Would you mind getting it please?"
Slowly, like a close-up in an old film, came realisation: the handbag must have been in the car. How could I not know that? Frantically I searched for telephone numbers and stopped all the debit and credit cards, all the store cards, which could be of use to whoever had taken them to Coventry overnight. The bus pass and loyalty cards could wait. The feeling of inadequacy and incompetence exhausted me.
The Switch card was stopped but there was time for five separate transactions to be made at various Tesco Stores in Coventry (with cashbacks, of course) and at J.D. Sports. But just think how much worse it would have been had not John Lewis contacted me so quickly. They told me they had a system in place which alerted them right away to any unusual practices: my partnership card is only used in Waitrose and in Robert Sayle so the handling in Coventry had immediately alerted them. How fortunate I was that the Halford purchase was the first to be made that day, and with the partnership card rather than Switch. I would not have known of the loss of my bag until the afternoon.
All has now been resolved: my new Switch card and my John Lewis partnership card have arrived, and, of course, I have to use another bag.
I shall treasure it.
More Cautionary Tales (circulating the E-mail)
I: I was approached at 3:30 pm in a Sheffield Tesco car-park by two males asking what kind of perfume I was wearing. Would I like to sample some fabulous scent they would sell me at a very reasonable rate? I probably would have agreed (Que!! Eds) had I not previously received an e-mail warning of this scam. It's not perfume...it's ether: if you sniff it, you'll pass out, and they'll take your wallet and heaven knows what else.
II: You walk across the car park, unlock your car and get inside. You lock all your doors, start the engine, but the rear-view mirror reveals a piece of paper stuck to the rear window. You jump out, but when you reach the back of your car, car-jackers appear, jump in and take off, quite probably with your (if female) handbag.
Many thanks to Janet Willmot for these