I Could Be Wrong, But...
Was $14,345.95— |
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On Globalization, and Boatloads of Bissel Upright Steam Cleaners
© 2008 David Boyne
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Recently, I’ve been thinking about Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand.
Adam Smith was not a magician. Or maybe he was. But he had many fascinating ideas about Man, and Money, and Making Stuff, and Moving Stuff Around the World. Adam Smith called one of his ideas about Man, Money, Making Stuff, and Moving Stuff Around the World, The Invisible Hand.
This is from InvestorWords.com:
According to Adam Smith, in a free market each participant will try to maximize self-interest, and the interaction of market participants, leading to exchange of goods and services, enables each participant to be better off than when simply producing for himself/herself. He further said that in a free market, no regulation of any type would be needed to ensure that the mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services took place, since this "invisible hand" would guide market participants to trade in the most mutually beneficial manner.
This is from my brain:
According to Adam Smith, even if you could name, account for, and present in a pie chart, each component of the infinitely complex components necessary for me to walk into a café in Encinitas, California and exchange some printed paper for a cup of coffee brewed from shade-grown beans farmed on a mountain in Peru, there would still be one thing no supercomputer algorithmic bean counter could ever capture. That one thing, Smith called the Invisible Hand. And The Invisible Hand, Smith said, is why and how Man Makes Money and Makes Stuff and Moves Both Around the World.
You may ask, “But why have you recently been thinking about Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand?”
Or maybe you have not asked this, but I shall pretend you did, and answer your question.
Circumstantial evidence leads me to suspect that someone employed in some place in or around Encinitas, California, probably in a bar, or a café, or a bookstore, as these are places I frequently frequent, stole the number, the security code, and the correct spelling of my name from my debit card. They, or someone they sold this information to, then removed $493 from my checking account.
I realized all of this when I chanced, while in The Cloud, to visit my bank account and check my balance. I immediately saw that an Invisible Hand had removed $493.00 from my checking account.
My adventure in our Global Economy had begun.
I grabbed my cell phone and called the toll-free, always open, Customer Service phone number on my bank's website.
As anyone over the age of 7 knows, toll-free Customer Service numbers have nothing to do with serving customers and everything to do with corporations keeping their employees from wasting expensive time in talking with and serving their customers.
After spending 15 minutes of my once-in-a-lifetime life wandering the labyrinth of my bank’s defense mechanism voice mail system, I finally found a human who would speak to me. I could tell it was a real human, not a computer, because she stumbled over some of the words on the script she read from when answering my questions. As her answers to my questions made no sense, I asked to speak with her supervisor. I then spent another 5 minutes of my once-in-a-lifetime life on hold, being water-boarded with Muzak® renditions of 1970s-era disco musak.
Finally, with the Customer Service Supervisor on the line, who, oddly, shared my name, David, we “had a dialogue.” I improvised all of my lines, while the other David, had memorized almost all his lines from a script.
“There’s a pending charge of $493 on my account,” I said. “To PayPal.”
“I can see there is a pending charge to your account to PayPal.”
“I haven’t purchased anything from PayPal.”
“But there is a pending charge on your account. It is to PayPal.”
“Can you tell me what this charge is for?”
“$493.”
I thought maybe I was on the phone with Samuel Beckett, or maybe the genius who wrote the Who’s On First syllogism for Abbott and Costello.
It was my turn now, and I took it. I said, “I can see that there is a pending charge of $493 on my account going to PayPal. Can you tell me what this charge is for?”
“I don’t know,” my doppelganger David said.
“He’s on third base,” I said.
“What?”
“Forget it.” I said. “Can you just tell me what this code on the transaction means?"
"That is a transaction code."
I was still in The Cloud, so whie on the phone, I Googled* the transaction code: PMELANSO1.
“Listen, David,” I said. “I just Googled that transaction code and it’s linked to some Korean sandal company on eBay.”
“Did you buy sandals?”
“No! And certainly not $493 worth of sandals from some Korean company on eBay! Clearly, this is some kind of fraud going on. Somebody is using my debit card. I need to stop this transaction from being approved.”
“After the transaction is settled you can file a dispute.”
“You mean, you’re going to give my money to the thieves, even though I’ve caught them in the act? Caught them before the payment has been made?”
“After the transaction is settled you can file a dispute. You might want to cancel your debit card. ”
“David, why don’t you just void this transaction? I manage an ecommerce site and void transactions before they've settled just about every day."
"I can't do that."
"Okay," I said. "How about you pick up a phone and call PayPal and stop this from happening?”
“I can't do that. But you can call PayPal if you want. ”
I then practiced what Eckart Tollé, Dr. Robert Anthony, Thich Nhat Hahn, and Yogi Berra, the most brilliant spiritual teachers I have ever encountered, have labored to teach me. I let go of all my negativity and resistance. I accepted what is.
And then I also took several deep, long, slow breathes. And then I chanted a pacifying mantra that I had learned my first year in Manhattan and reserved for only the most trying of times, “Sons of bitches mother fuckers.”
And then I spent 5 minutes of my once-in-a-lifetime life searching for the Toll-Free Customer Service number buried in the deepest strata of the PayPal website.
Once I drilled down and mined the phone number, I phoned it. I then spent 20 minutes of my once-in-a-lifetime life penetrating the corporate defense mechanism voice mail labyrinth of PayPal.
At long last, I got a human on the line who worked in the Fraud department. (Yes, PayPal has an entire department devoted to Fraud. Whether this is fraud that PayPal perpetrates or fraud that is perpetrated on PayPal, or both, I cannot say.) I was, by this time, not even shocked that this person in the Fraud Department of Paypal was named David. This David immediately recognized the Korean sandel transaction as bogus. He even went off script and told me what it was that the Invisible Hand had used my stolen debit card information for: “They bought a Bissell Upright Steam Cleaner for $493. ”
I said, “Sons of bitches mother fuckers. A vacuum cleaner?”
The David inside the Fraud Department of PayPal at some undisclosed location went back on script. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
"No."
"Would you like to open a PayPal account?"
"No."
"Would you like to apply for a PayPal credit card. We can offer—"
I closed my cell phone and began spending all of the minutes of my once-in-a-lifetime life on other things.
The next day, at my office, as part of my therapy for recovering from my travels in the Global Economy courtesy of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, I mentioned, i.e., I vented, to my colleague Ramon.
Fortunately, I did not have to spend 5 minutes of my once-in-a-lifetime life to find a Toll-Free Customer Service Number and another 15 minutes of my once-in-a-lifetime life to penetrate our company's defense mechanism voice mail system. I simply stepped over to Ramon's desk and said, “Somebody stole my debit card information and raided my checking account.”
Ramon said, “No way.”
I said, “And you know what the sonsofbitches motherfuckers bought with my money?”
Ramon said, “What”
I said, “A Bissell Upright Steam Cleaner.”
When a deeply thoughtful look came over Ramon, I felt that, at long last, I had found someone who appreciated and empathized with the Sturm und Drang I had survived over the past several days of running through a bizarre, tortuous endurance course designed by Franz Kafka.
But Ramon said, “When I lost my wallet in Vegas a few months ago one of the things they used my credit cards to buy was a Bissell thing.”
I was stunned. I recovered enough to ask, “How much was it?”
Ramon said, “Something like 490 bucks.”
Ramon then tilted his head, furrowed his brows, and asked me, “What’s a Bissell?”
But I could not answer, as all the energy of my brain was engaged in reeling off a vivid mental movie, complete with a stunning helicopter shot swooping down on a convoy of giant freighter ships crossing the sun drenched Pacific ocean, following a well-trafficked course leading to a certain sandal making company in Korea. The convoy of giant freighter ships carried nothing, absolutely nothing, but thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Bissell Upright Steam Cleaners.
As I stumbled back to my desk, Ramon called out, “But what’s a Bissell?”
“It’s another word for The Invisible Hand.”
Share* This is from Wikipedia.com:
The verb to google (also spelled to Google) refers to using the Google search engine to obtain information on the Web. For example, "Mary googled for recipes." A neologism arising from the popularity and dominance[1] of the eponymous search engine, the American Dialect Society chose it as the "most useful word of 2002." [2] It was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary on June 15, 2006,[3] and to the 11th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary in July 2006.[4] The first recorded usage of google used as a verb was on July 8, 1998, by Larry Page himself, who wrote on a mailing list: "Have fun and keep googling!"[5]