Les Bonnes Choses

A week ago tomorrow, I picked up my 3 year old Lenovo X60 notebook, which I had sent in for repairs just 9 days before the warranty was set to expire on it. A week ago Saturday, I walked away from the table after Skyping with Heather with the gee-dee microphone still clipped to my shirt, sending the thing off the table and on to the tile floor beneath. Its been a little off ever since, and the Page Up button no longer works. So now I'm shopping for another notebook. In truth, the timing isn't all that bad, as the reason the extended warranty had run out was because I feel that 3 years is a reasonable lifespan for a notebook; after that point, it's hard to tell whether your computer is acting screwy because it's become misconfigured, the hardware is malfunctioning, or it just isn't up to running some crazy-ass software that you need to run in order to read your client's bloody email attachments.

As I am still affiliated with an academic institution, I qualify for academic pricing, so I was shopping around at the Lenovo site. I may have picked out the notebook that will see me through my next round of job talks and conference presentations. The insurance payout from my written off motorcycle means I could even buy it with cash in hand. The catch: you can't buy over the internet with cash in hand; you need a credit card. I have a credit card -- two in fact. However, one is from a Canadian lender, and the other has a paltry $500 credit limit. If I use the Canadian card, I lose money on the exchange rate when I make the purchase, and then again when I convert US dollars back to Canadian to pay it off. Screw that. I contacted Capital One to see if I could make a big lump sum payment upfront so that I would have a large credit showing on my account. To my surprise, they wrote back to tell me that, even if the credit showing on my account equals or exceeds the cost of the purchase, making a purchase that goes over my $500 credit limit will still entail me exceeding my credit limit, and bring on all the financial fire and brimstone that goes along with that.

I'm posting this on the internet because I'd like it to be documented forevermore that Capital One is run by people with rather poor business acumen. Somewhere along the way, they have forgotten the point of a credit limit, which is to manage the risk they are willing to assume in lending money. Credit lenders get a slice of every transaction made with their cards. My credit limit is preventing me from making a purchase that would earn the company maybe twenty or thirty dollars. By suggesting I put a credit on my account, I have proposed a way that they can earn that commission without assuming any risk whatsoever. It is literally only upside for them. And they don't want anything to do with it. So, I'm doing the electronic age equivalent of shouting from the mountaintops! Come, google search bots. Index my account, and let it show up in the shareholders reports and competitor's due diligence reports.

This doesn't mean I'm an activist. Just crotchety.

Followup: I just wrote a letter via the Capital One message center asking why they don't like earning revenue and if they can recommend a product that would allow me to complete my transaction. Except I was maybe a little bit condescending.