A Black Hole

A black hole has opened up around me and is sucking out every dime, nickel, loonie and twoonie it can find.  We've had one of those weeks were the motto "if it can go wrong it will" is very apropos.  Here's a small list of big $$ things that have come up:

• Psychologist bill
• Liam needs new glasses (with a new prescription just 6 months after his last prescription change)
• The tenants toilet clogged and backed up in their tub.  On a Saturday.  After hours.  Liam really should be a plumber when he grows up since they charge a crap load to deal with, well a crap load!
• Not only did the plumber charge us for 4 hours of after hours Saturday work, he also told us that we will need to rip up the pipes that go from the house to the city's main pipe and have it replaced
• $200 + of flowers

$200+ for flowers?  Hardly seems like a necessity.  If money is tight just don't buy them.

Umm.. no kidding!

The problem is that I bought the flowers in November for my Grandmother's birthday.  And in November they cost $40.  Seemed reasonable.  I live in Nova Scotia and she lives in Ontario, so the easiest way to do this seemed to be on the internet.  So I found a site, they had a good deal, so I signed up and placed my order.  They were delivered on time and were lovely.  So when  Hilary's sister's birthday rolled around, we went back to that website to order from them again.  Only we couldn't remember our login name or password, so we signed up again.  We ordered another $40 of flowers and didn't look back.

If you have a keen reader's eye, you may have caught on already to the problem.  We had to "sign up" to this web site.  Somehow I missed what exactly I was signing up for.  I assumed (yeah yeah, I'm an ass) that they needed all of my info for billing purposes.  What I missed was that I was signing up for their "Reward" program.  Which was going to cost me $9.99 a month. 

Since I don't order flowers more then once or twice a year, I certainly don't need their "Reward" program.  I most definitely don't need it twice! 

When our credit card bill arrived yesterday I glanced at it and saw these 2 charges for $9.99.  And something clicked.  Hadn't I seen that on last month's statement?  What the heck was that for anyway?   Apparently I need to look at our credit card statement much more closely.  Once we pulled them out for the last few months we found that they all had these little $9.99 tucked in between our other monthly charges. 

D'Oh!

A call to their 800 # left me frustrated and even more angry.  I waited through 5 minutes of their advertisement only to be told that they were closed.  Great.  So now I have to find the time between 8:00 and 5:00 EST to call this company and get this sorted out.

You can bet that I'll be reading all fine print with a magnifying glass and a legalese dictionary at my side from now on!