North Texas-

I don’t smoke and never have, so I really don’t know what a pack of cigarettes costs these days. Just a guess…..$3 to $4? Ask Jon Seale of North Texas and he may give you an entirely different answer, because when Jon buys a pack of cigarettes, he goes all out, sparing no expense to get the very best he can.

One day Jon went into a Wolfgang Puck’s, Five Sixty restaurant and bought a pack of cigarettes using his Wachovia Visa Buxx credit card. No big deal, he does it all the time. But when Jon went to check his credit card statement, he saw that he had been slightly overcharged for the smokes. To be exact, his bill was more than 2,000 the entire national debt of the United States of America. He was charged a nice round $23,148,855,308,184,500.00, also known as 23 quadrillion,148 trillion, 855 billion, 308 million, 184,000 thousand, 500 dollars. I am wondering, for that much money couldn’t he have bought the entire world? At the very least he could have bough the restaurant where he bought the cigarettes.

Boy oh boy, it’s a really good thing he caught that mistake, otherwise poor Jon would have been in debt for a very long time. It’s not like Wachovia or Visa were going to call and say, “Oops, sorry but we overcharged you.” When was the last time a credit card company gave a shit about anyone? I thought this was a great story, and as I researched it the plot got a little deeper. I discovered that the same exact thing, and the same exact over charge also happened to Josh Muszynski of Manchester, New Hampshire. Hmmmmmm……Now I’m beginning to wonder……is there a conspiracy going on here between Wachovia and the tobacco companies?

In the end, Visa went on record as saying, “A temporary programming error at Visa Debit Processing Services caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted to a small number of Visa prepaid accounts. The technical glitch has been corrected, and all erroneous postings have been removed.” Good thing as I’m sure Jon and Josh were really sweating it, just hoping and praying they wouldn’t have to hire lawyers.

The moral of the story: Always check your credit card statement.

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