I have been post-divorce and single for two years. It has been Important. And I’m really ready to meet someone. Please notice the capitalization of Important. It’s not just poor editing. It covers a whole two years of solo evenings on the couch and waking up alone. But also what is known in divorce circles as doing the work. I don’t really know what a divorce circle is, but I’m intimately knowledgable about the work of emerging from a long marriage.
Last Monday night, I went to bed at 8:30pm. This was because daylight savings had ended, so I was now waking up at 4:30am instead of 5:30am, and because I’m a chronic insomniac, and I lie awake for hours every night planning my next novel. So by 8:30 that night, I was preternaturally tired and I just fell onto my bed and sank into an inhumanly deep sleep. Sort of like the sleep that hibernating bears sink into in caves in the arctic. Only I was in Fairfax, shortly after dinner on a Monday evening.
I was woken at approximately 12:13am by the ping of text coming in. Please don’t judge me. Yes, I leave my cellphone on by my bed at night, thus opening myself up to harmful rays and probably brain cancer and maybe even hydrocephalus, though the science isn’t quite in on that one yet. But I’m a single mom of a teen who sleeps elsewhere several times a week. Thus my phone is sometimes on by my bed. She could have a teen crisis at 2am. It has happened.
The text said that there was a fraud alert from my credit card company. It asked me whether I had recently made a purchase from Walmart. This is like asking a Republican whether they want to go on Ellen and do contact improv with Barack and Michelle. I immediately called my credit card company.
The nice chap who answered (after midnight PST, what time could it possibly have been where he was?!) introduced himself as Russell, my Relationship Manager. I felt a momentary surge of excitement. Relationship Manager? Could he be about to...But no, I quickly woke up enough to realize that he was not talking about finding me a loving life partner who cared about how my day was, wanted to bring me lilies and hoped to take me out for lobster dinners. Clearly, relationship manager in terms of my credit card meant managing the relationship between me and...what did it mean exactly??
While I was puzzling over this, Russell deftly exacted from me the last four of my social, my date of birth, my mother’s O-Level math result, and the details of my last credit card purchase. I had no idea of the latter, it was after midnight and I couldn’t even remember my name too well, but I hazarded some kind of guess that seemed to satisfy him. Plus I mentioned, probably with more heat than necessary, that there was no way I nor anyone I knew had made a purchase at Walmart in the last hundred years.
Russell very kindly reassured me that my card had been compromised and there would be no charge to me. We chuckled together in a moment of weird connection about how the scumbag who had stolen my credit card information may have got away with some lousy purchase at Walmart but would be stalled at their next attempted crime. I hoped it was the intent to purchase a gun somewhere. Maybe even at a Walmart. But I didn’t mention this to Russell, because some part of my very sleep-addled brain was still sort of hoping that he was Managing my Relationship. And it wouldn’t do to come across as emotionally brittle.
After we wished each other a very good night, and he assured me my new credit card would be arriving within seven to ten business days, I reflected on how very many phonecalls I was going to have to make to change all my autopays to the new card number. Then I drifted off into a sort of doze again. It was now 12:38am, and my defunct credit card information was sort of floating round the universe waiting to stick in vain to some criminal malcontent.
Meanwhile, I was cosy in my bed, feeling thankful that the crazy amped-up tech industry made it possible for my card company to text me about possible fraud just minutes after someone used my stolen information to make a purchase at Walmart. But most of all, I was feeling sleepily grateful that in some call center somewhere, Russell was busy being my Relationship Manager. Surely, given his laudable efficiency, by the time I woke he would have found me the perfect man?!
But you will have to wait for the next blog post to find out
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