From Wit’s End

Well, I just tried to make our first reservation using the Bluegreen Sampler package that we bought a few months ago.

I want to go to my 5th Homecoming at Grove City College, but the 13-hour drive from SC to PA is a bit steep in one day. So i had the idea that stopping in Gordonsville, VA at one of Bluegreen’s resort locations would make a nice halfway point. Well, the customer service agent just told me that those using the sampler package have to reserve a minimum of three consecutive nights at a time. So staying on just Thursday night and Sunday night is not an option according to the rules.

We have 9000 points, and weekend nights at their resort locations are around 2000-2500 points each, so our package won’t go to far if we actually want to use it when we’re not actually working. So we’re going to have to figure out how to use these points three nights at a time, and avoid anything more than one weekend.

Strike One, Bluegreen.

A charge for "AOL*Autovantage" for $89.99 showed up on Rachel’s credit card, and neither of us could figure out where it came from.

(Apparently, we aren’t the only ones that this has happened to.)

Rachel’s "membership" was activated by cashing a "refund" check from AOL for $2.50 back in August.  Her "membership" was "free" for two months, which is why a charge didn’t show up until November.  This is just long enough for a normal person to forget what caused it and be surprised by the first charge.  The ramifications of cashing the small check were all in the fine print of the mailing in which the check came, apparently.

We called our bank to try to get the charge reversed and block any further charges, since the AOL monkey told me it could take one or two billing cycles for the cancellation to show up on the credit card bill.  We’ll see what happens.  A chronic disease on all corporate thieves.