Back from Europe Part 2

Hmm... Where did we leave off... Oh yes, all the crazy things tied around the Europe trip.

Well this next bit has to do with the 24 hours AFTER returning to Europe.

It starts about 30 minutes after we arrived from our plane flight from Philly, which was our connecting flight from Paris. It was at this time that we realized that I had no luggage. Yep, they lost mine. Jimmy's bag went on the belt just before mine in Philly. We had to check it in again after we arrived from Paris due to customs regulations, so we knew it made it to the states. But where then? Who knows. All I knew was I was without my luggage... No clothes. No gifts. No thingy to connect my camera to the TV to show photos. Major bummer. We ended up staying at the airport about another hour hoping to find the luggage on another carousel, but to no avail. We filled out the lost luggage repot, left with our fingers crossed and went home.

When I got home I needed to get my car back. We had kept it at my mom's so that it wouldn't be parked on the street in our neighborhood for 11 days, thus resulting in many nasty notices from our HOA. I was told that Ryan, my sister's boyfriend, would drive it home for me. So I called him and asked him to please do so and he said he would. About ten minutes later I get a call telling me that my car won't start. They had moved it once while we were gone, but now no luck. Fortunately about that time a neighbor pulled in the lot and helped Ryan jump the car.

That was the first three hours home. It was about midnight when we went to bed only to be greated by a far nastier Monday.

The good news is the luggage showed up at my door around noon the next day. I didn't even open it for about two days because I was so busy, but when I finally did look into the bag all was well with the world again. All my stuff was there as I had packed it.

The not so good news is on Monday about 2:00 p.m. I got a call from Jimmy. He'd spent his day doing deliveries to his clients. He'd gone to the office before his deliveries and all was well, but when he returned his office had been broken into. Yep. Robbed. They took 40.00 in cash, two credit card bills, two utility bills, 30.00 in stamps and our credit card processing machine (a new one is about 400.00), and car registration informatoin along with the emissions certificate we were about to send off that day.

So we spent the rest of our day calling everyone we thought it affected. Fortunately they left all the checks we had made out. Jimmy normally doesn't leave all that laying around his office, but there was a lot of paperwork and so he decided to unburden his briefcase and leave the stuff on his desk. Super bad.

In the process of figuring out what card statements the robbers got ahold of, we realized that there was a recurring monthly charge on one of the cards. Normally Jimmy shows me the card statements before he pays them, but for some reason he didn't do it with one account last month. Turns out our card was being used fraudulently. We're not sure if it is "true" fraud or if MSN screwed up. The charge was for MSN Internet Service, which we don't get. We wonder if someone just keyed in something incorrectly. Anyway, we got new cards issued. MSN is running a fraud check and so is our credit card account. We are not being held responsible for any of the charges. A particularily frustrating part of this process was that I had to talk to someone in India. Actually, Jimmy called them first and got NOWHERE. So I called them. I was close to getting nowhere when I told her I couldn't understand her. She clearly didn't understand what I was trying to say to her. I told her the card was being used fraudulently and all she could say in return was no, the bill was paid last month. Great. Eventually I managed to get her to transfer me to an English speaking person who had no trouble helping me. They FedEx'd us new cards the next day and cancelled the old ones and did all the other paperworky stuff that needed to be done.

And that, my friends, is my story about the mishappenings in and out of Europe for the last 12 days.