21 February, 2000

We finally decided that we needed some time to ourselves and got a room at the Park Regency Hotel in San Diego. It's a dump. But for $230/week we got a fully-furnished room with a kitchen and bathtub with a phone and TV. Good enough. Most of all, we got some time to be alone together and not impose upon the generosity of our friends.

Decided today that it is time to start re-purchasing some basic camping gear and some clothes. Found out pretty quickly that the process of buying new stuff is pretty rough, emotionally. Sometimes you don't realize how much you liked something until you go to buy a new one and find out that they don't make it anymore- but now there is a model with "improvements" that you don't like, don't want, and for which you certainly aren't inclined to pay extra.

We came back to our hotel to find that the guy who's been opening up credit card accounts at various department stores tried to open yet another one at Home Depot in San Diego (don't know which one). Last we heard the cops were on their way, but who knows if he got caught. The only information we have is that he's African American. How in the world a black guy could possibly manage to use Steve's blonde-haired, blue-eyed ID to do any type of transaction at all is thoroughly beyond us.

We also learned that only about one in five incoming calls actually get in to our phone. Very frustrating. Steve called the office and the SOB on the other end of the phone actually yelled at him and hung up on him when Steve asked why a local call was not going through and if/when the incoming calls issue would be resolved. Unbelievable! We would leave and go somewhere else right now- but the hotel has a questionable refund policy and we don't have the energy to fight it. When there are literally dozens of battles to be fought, you gotta pick and choose the ones you can win. But the knowledge that we are getting yet another bum-deal is grating on our nerves.

As of last count the people involved in thieving our identity have attempted to open over 20 separate lines of credit in our names. The most frustrating part, aside from the overwhelming feeling of violation that we feel, is that in the eyes of the police there has been no crime committed against us. Can you believe that?!? It turns out that technically we are not victims because once the credit agency removed the debt from our name, we have no damages and the credit agency is actually the victim.

Well… regardless of how the law sees it, there is no doubt in our minds that we have suffered some abuse here. The fact that our legal system doesn't even recognize the affront just rubs salt in our wounds. On the upside, we've gotten fairly adept at navigating the maze of inept phone-catchers that most credit departments seem to have up front. Our average phone-time is down to a few minutes instead of the 10-15 minutes that it used to take. Now there is a skill that we would have been perfectly happy to have never developed!

Staying with them was wonderful, as usual. We caught up on our sleep and spent some time tending to insurance paperwork. We would like to thank Kevin O'Hea, of AAA insurance for working so hard with us and for us in getting our claim worked out. We have been very impressed with his attention to our claim.