Hot Costs

This week I got a call from my credit card company. I was trying to buy something -- and it doesn't really matter what I was trying to buy, the important thing to know is that I was trying to buy something fairly expensive that I totally didn't need -- and I handed the guy my card and he swiped it through the thingy and we waited for a moment and then it beeped in an alarmingly different kind of way, a way you don't want it to, and the guy looked up at me and said in a voice that I'm pretty sure they're trained to use -- a tone that implies this is clearly an error, this is just a computer glitch --- when they're really saying, literally, "The card was declined. Do you have another one?"