The Credit Card

I never dreamt of having a credit card. I never wanted one. I associate credit card with complexity. It looks like a piece of plastic that promises to simplify but ended up adding complexity to your life.

So, clearly, I never had one. I successfully avoided every attempt of luring me into using one: I took a different route when I saw cc (short for credit card, not carbon copy) sales lurking around and quickly hung up the phone when some banks tried to persuade me for having one.

However, it seemed that the furious cc battle among banks have made them desperate. One morning, I received an envelope from my bank, and guess what, a shiny credit card miraculously appeared there! Hey, I never asked for one ! There was a note next to the card, ” Please call xxxxx to activate your credit card.”
So I thought, “that’s easy, I don’t have to activate this card!”.

Three days afterwards, my phone rang. It was from the bank and the lovely lady gladly announced, ” Mam, your credit card is ready for use now. I’ve activated it for you! Your card is a platinum and you can withdraw up to xxxxx million rupiah, you’re also given 50% discount if you’re shopping and dining at xxxxx , there will be no administrative charge for the first year and you’ll get an access to the airport lounge and basically you can live happily ever after with your card. Do you have any question about your card?”
My question was , ” How can I cancel this?”.
But she insisted that I try the card for at least a year.

So I thought, fine ! I’ll succumb to your temptation and see if I can actually do something good with this plastic for a year !

Not long after, Irene told me about her cc woes, how her bank is driving her insane and forced her to pay an amount of money to prolong her cc use to another year. It’s quite funny how they actually rejected her appeal for cancelling the cc ! See, I’d knew it ! Cc is nothing but pain ! Maybe I should really cancel that card now, before they’re forcing me to pay for an extra year!

Why do people think they ‘need’ credit cards ? I know some people have more than three credit cards with them. Will I ever ‘need’ one ?