Credit card companies -- a pox on both their houses

In this morning's Chronicle, David Lazarus reports on yet another instance of a credit card company losing millions of customer records.

Coincidentally, I was surveyed last night, in a random telephone poll, about this issue. If you've ever had the patience to sit through one of these polls -- and I always do, because I once was a telephone poller for a few months and I have compassion for the people who have to do the mindless job -- you know that by the end of the poll you can guess who the client is and what they really want to know. And in this case, it was VISA, and they want to know how upset people are about "recent instances" of credit card record theft -- in particular the incident in 2004 that was only revealed last month, the one where a company called Card Systems Solutions was hacked and had the records of 40 million accounts stolen.

They polled on how aware I was of the incident, and whether it would make me less likely to use my credit card in the future. I had to say no, since how are you going to not use credit cards?

But they did not ask me about what I'm really upset about when it comes to credit cards. Let me count the ways:

The way credit cards companies market to young people and get them $30,000 in debt before they're 24 years old

The way companies offer a low interest rate for a period of time if you transfer your balance, then if you're even one day late on the payments, jack up the interest rate to the max, much higher than what you were paying before you transferred the balance. In one case I found myself paying 29.9% interest on an account I thought I was paying 0% on, just because I was two days late with a payment!

I wish I could tell them to go fuck themselves. But just like everybody else, I'm a slave to convenience.

VISA, MasterCard, credit cards, David Lazarus