We live in a world where a stolen credit card number can wreck your day by grinding everything to a halt. The worst part is that it’s often not clear how certain key information is leaked and even if the cause eventually is discovered it’s far too long after the fact to trace its original source. I pondered for a bit how our world has so many moving parts, perhaps too many, and that is why these surprise thefts occur. 

The bigger issue is that these card numbers are how we pay for goods and services on a daily basis, many of them on automatic payment. So if you have to get a new number, you then have to recall everywhere it needs to be updated. I have known people who have a separate card for different charges for exactly this reason. If there’s a hack, it’s easy to mitigate the damage. But most people only have one or maybe two cards, meaning that a card that needs to be replaced can wreak havoc in one’s daily life.

Even more demoralizing is when you discover after reporting a fraudulent charge is that it was – in fact – an authorized charge, but not one that matches anything in your purchase history, thanks to charging an authorization (of fifty cents or so) then “forgetting” to charge the other several hundred dollars until a month after the fact – automatically looking like a red flag. When you can’t even trust a retailer to account for things properly, then make it your problem, that’s when you know you really can’t trust anyone. 

One needs to dedicate his or her entire day to account for every single deposit and debit, purchase and expense, until it clears entirely. It doesn’t help to ask, what is wrong with people, because the answer is obvious, there are so many moving parts in our world that just one stalling out causes the entire machine to glitch. Now, glitches are just a part of everyday life, and they’ve become our problem, not the problem of those that originated them.