Poor M. He's been in a tight spot since his brother had his gall bladder removed last Thursday. He's been working in the store by himself. Sometimes his Mom can come spell him so he can go to the mailbox or the bank, but she's been taking care of BIL so she hasn't been available.

Yesterday our babysitter needed the day off so we asked Grandma G. to watch Emma. She could, but if she's doing that she can't come to relieve M. at the store. So he was stuck there all day on the day he normally makes his grocery run over the mountains. He decided that he'd bite the bullet and go shopping after we put Emma down to bed. He hates to ever miss bath time. He didn't leave the house until 9:00 p.m. It's a 1 hour 20 minute drive to get to Walmart. These shopping trips take a minimum of 5 hours, usually longer.

He does his shopping at Walmart and goes to check out. They ring up two carts worth of groceries and when he gives them the store check it comes back "denied." Bear in mind it is nearly midnight. So he asks why? It says on the ticket Reason #88. What does that mean? "I don't know, you'll have to call the phone number on the ticket." So he calls the number for Telecheck, the outfit that denied him. They're closed, of course. Trying to salvage his trip he pulls out his credit card. They scan it, "denied." By this point he's pretty fed up and it being the night shift there's really no one to help him. He walks away from two full carts and leaves the store. He didn't even go to Kroger, he came right home. He got in around 2:00 a.m.

This morning he tells me about it and I start worrying. Are his accounts frozen for some reason we don't know about? Is it the IRS? Did they freeze all our accounts? Is our savings frozen? Because I put most of that money in there!...You know how I am.

Before he gets in the shower the phone rings, it's Chase Bank's fraud department. They're concerned about some activity on his card last night. Yeah. What he finds out is that paying for his new tires yesterday and then later the same day paying $500 for groceries alerted their fraud doo-hickey so they just denied it. Nice, huh? So the denial of the credit card is in no way related to the check denial. But still, using your credit card twice in one day causes an alert? Give me a break. As soon as he got off the phone with Chase bank he called the (separate) fraud alert company and cancelled their service on his card. The credit card company blamed the fraud alert company and the fraud alert company blamed the credit card company. I told him he should ditch Chase Bank all together. I'm tired of their stupid phone solicitations anyway.

When he gets to the store he calls the bank first thing. No problems with his checking account, plenty of money there. Then he calls this Telecheck outfit. Reason #88 is that they don't have enough information on him. WTF? Walmart has his name, address, phone number, tax ID, everything you could possible want to know! So he gives Telecheck all this information. Then they say, it will be six days until this information is in the system and you can write checks again. WHAT!?! (That would be anywhere that uses Telecheck) So he can't go back to Walmart and get his groceries or pick up his customer's prescriptions till next week?

He calls Walmart and talks to the manager. He explains to the manager...I come to your store every week, I spend on average $500 a week, I always write checks, I've never had a check bounce, I drove over 100 miles round trip last night to shop at your store and this is what happened to me. The mananger is all sorts of apologetic. He explains that it's a Telecheck hitch and he's really, really sorry. Of course everyone he's called all along the way has been apologetic, but no one really owns it, you know?

He reports all this to me and I'm relieved we're not wanted by the IRS. I'm also terribly sorry for M. as he went through all that hassle last night and still doesn't have the groceries he needs. I talked to M. around noon time and he told me that the manager at Walmart had called him back three more times and told him that he had found that there was nothing he could do for him at the store level. It appears the six day waiting period stands.

Is that F***** up or what?