Maybe hacked is too advanced for what has happened to my family in the past few days. Someone has stolen our credit card information and used it at a couple of places in Chicago, including a donut shop, of all places. You would think the thief would have used it for something more ambitious, maybe a new car. Either way, our credit card is now effectively dead. We learned about the Chicago purchases from the credit union that issued our card. They immediately cancelled our hacked card and issue us a new one. Takes about a week to receive the new one, a spokesman said.

Earlier, we started hearing from companies to which we owed monthly payments, telling us that our automatic deductions had failed to go through because of a problem with our credit card. We use this automatic deduction system  with several companies, It’s a wonderful convenience. Ironically, this convenient feature will cause us the most hassle when our new card arrives. We will need to reach out to every single company to give them our new card number and cancel the old one from their records.

This makes the second time within a year that this has happened to us, and the same routine was followed. Report it, get a new card, notify all of our automatic-deduction vendors of the change. A pain to us and the employees who need to process yet another credit card fraud case.

We all appreciate the convenience of that little piece of plastic that buys things and pays our bills. Perhaps we also should understand its vulnerability to fraud. I suspect that our family is like most everyone in this respect: We use our card plenty and rarely carry much cash with us. We try to be careful with our card and its information, but we refuse to give up on its convenience.

Today’s word: that vs. who. People are not things. They are people. Refer to them as people, not things. The proper pronoun for a person is who, not that. She is the one who presided at the meeting, NOT she is the one that presided.