I was a client and a regular user of Citibank's credit card service for over ten years. Good track record of making payments on time, no outstanding black marks, I don't think. Very occassionally I would miss a payment and they would slap me with a $20 fee, but that hasn't happened for years. Nothing major, at least not in my book.

Periodically, they would send me a new credit card, as credit card companies do. I fondly recall, when I moved to Prague, that when I tried to change my address, it initally showed up on the envelope as "Czechoslovak, IA." Try to get your head around that one.

About a year ago, the new credit card stopped arriving for no apparent reason. They were sending them, but they weren't arriving. No change on my part. No explanation. I would ask them to send it again each time, and they would say, "We sent it, but it came back -- can we double check the address?" I figured they'd outsourced the foreign shipments to some provider who couldn't get his head around my funny looking address.

After a while I sort of gave up, and let it slip for many months because I had better things to do. Finally, I called them a couple months ago to try to sort the things out. The account had been dormant for so long that I had to re-apply.

They turned me down, probably because I had no employer or visible means of support. When they did their "credit check," they probably didn't both to check whether I'd ever been a client before. Infuriating.

Thank you for reading. I feel marginally better about it now.