When the system mostly works

I just got off the phone with a very nice person from the Wells Fargo Fraud department who wanted to ask me some questions about some apparantly suspicious charges that were trying to come through on my checking account. Apparantly some nefarious person was attempting to buy software from Germany!

Oops, that was me.

And I had been becoming increasingly frustrated with the purchase attempt since I was pretty sure that I had been doing everything exactly correctly but for some reason the charges kept getting declined.

On the one hand I actually am kind of happy that they are being proactive enough that not only where they stopping the charge but they even called me within four minutes of my attempting to do the transaction. That’s near-realtime monitoring in action folks, and now that I’ve had a nice conversation with the guy I submitted the exact same information and it went through with no problems.

OTOH - So what if I was trying to buy software on the internet through a company that exists in Germany? I did an identical transaction with this company a little over two years ago, and a similar transaction with another company every two years for the past 6 (Grisoft, makers of AVG Anti-Virus, my currently mostly preferred AV suite). There is a point where I should be able to use my own funds in a global market without my financial institution being an irritating obstruction. That is alleviated somewhat by getting a fast response from the instituion in question by a real person who then made it not a problem but I wonder really how much I should be satisfied by that.