A few weeks back, my wife got a notice about an abnormality in one of our credit cards after she visited Walmart. Our credit card had been hacked on two separate occasions four or five years ago (maybe six), so the notice got her emotionally upset immediately.
It had something to do with double billing. The issue got quickly resolved. No problem. But the blood pressure went up for her (and me, by extension) for a short period of time until we went through all the hoops to figure out what was going on and achieved resolution.
These types of uncontrollable events cause angst, anxiety and anger for probably just about everybody in modern societies today. Using a credit or debit card implies trust that the company will protect your identity, not overbill you (or double bill you), won’t suddenly raise interest rates exponentially, and doesn’t share your personal information with others. You have to accept this on a trust basis.
For the HUGE majority of time, this all works. You use the card the way it was meant to be and get billed properly and nothing HAPPENS to upset you.
But all it takes is one event to shatter your emotional safety net. It can be something as simple as our Walmart incident. And, nothing actually happened. It was just the appearance that something was wrong that got us breathing too rapidly.
Electronic transactions do that to many people. There is a certain loss of control you have to accept based on the implicit relationship between the customer and the company that processes your account and bills you for the charges, while ensuring money goes to the business you just visited.
It’s that loss of control that can cause angst, anxiety and anger. When something goes awry, you first get the dreaded feeling – your heart dropping into your toes. You literally feel it sink.
Your face flushes. You instantaneously wonder, “What the heck is going on? What can I do to stop the problem?” A phone call to customer service often induces the anxiety that follows. Though you may often get the issue resolved with this individual, you also are inconvenienced by having to wait until the next available operator can get to you while you are on hold, steam tooting out your ears, your bowels loosening because you’re confident someone just stole $213 from your Visa account.
As you wait and ponder all the things that can go wrong, anxiety builds toward anger. “This shouldn’t happen. Who’s the f…..cker who’s doing this to me!?!?!? I’d like to wring his neck. Why doesn’t he put his thieving mentality into something productive for society instead of cheating the system? Why me?”
And, because you don’t receive answers to those questions (even though you get your problem resolved), you can go through the angst, anxiety and angle cycle once again the next time you’re confronted with similar circumstances. I’m not sure there’s an easy solution for how to deal with this logically given the emotions if involves for most of us humans.
Somehow you’ve got to come to a recognition that you’ve been through it before and everything turned out okay. Perhaps you need so say that over and over to yourself, “It will be okay. It will be okay.”
I’ll try that next time and let you know if it works.
It had something to do with double billing. The issue got quickly resolved. No problem. But the blood pressure went up for her (and me, by extension) for a short period of time until we went through all the hoops to figure out what was going on and achieved resolution.
These types of uncontrollable events cause angst, anxiety and anger for probably just about everybody in modern societies today. Using a credit or debit card implies trust that the company will protect your identity, not overbill you (or double bill you), won’t suddenly raise interest rates exponentially, and doesn’t share your personal information with others. You have to accept this on a trust basis.
For the HUGE majority of time, this all works. You use the card the way it was meant to be and get billed properly and nothing HAPPENS to upset you.
But all it takes is one event to shatter your emotional safety net. It can be something as simple as our Walmart incident. And, nothing actually happened. It was just the appearance that something was wrong that got us breathing too rapidly.
Electronic transactions do that to many people. There is a certain loss of control you have to accept based on the implicit relationship between the customer and the company that processes your account and bills you for the charges, while ensuring money goes to the business you just visited.
It’s that loss of control that can cause angst, anxiety and anger. When something goes awry, you first get the dreaded feeling – your heart dropping into your toes. You literally feel it sink.
Your face flushes. You instantaneously wonder, “What the heck is going on? What can I do to stop the problem?” A phone call to customer service often induces the anxiety that follows. Though you may often get the issue resolved with this individual, you also are inconvenienced by having to wait until the next available operator can get to you while you are on hold, steam tooting out your ears, your bowels loosening because you’re confident someone just stole $213 from your Visa account.
As you wait and ponder all the things that can go wrong, anxiety builds toward anger. “This shouldn’t happen. Who’s the f…..cker who’s doing this to me!?!?!? I’d like to wring his neck. Why doesn’t he put his thieving mentality into something productive for society instead of cheating the system? Why me?”
And, because you don’t receive answers to those questions (even though you get your problem resolved), you can go through the angst, anxiety and angle cycle once again the next time you’re confronted with similar circumstances. I’m not sure there’s an easy solution for how to deal with this logically given the emotions if involves for most of us humans.
Somehow you’ve got to come to a recognition that you’ve been through it before and everything turned out okay. Perhaps you need so say that over and over to yourself, “It will be okay. It will be okay.”
I’ll try that next time and let you know if it works.
