Wallet Watch

Instead of bringing this blog out of the mothballs, as I’ve done just a couple of hours ago, I seriously considered changing it to a blog called “credit card idiot” and doing all kinds of ridiculous things with all of the credit card solicitations I have received at my house. These included creating an actual house of cards with all the sample cards, wallpapering my walls with all of the junk mail papers, or calling the customer service numbers and acting like a total idiot and then recording myself and posting it on the blog. While these all seemed like great uses of my time, I for some reason never got around to it, although I still do have an enormous stack of solicitations on a shelf next to my desk.

Short of these noble goals, I’m forced to blog about some of the idiotic things other people have done with some of the 6 billion credit card solicitations sent out every year. Here’s one of my favorities, via nbcsandiego.com:

SAN DIEGO — A pug in Northern California would have purchased his doggie treats with plastic after being issued a credit card by mail.

The dog, named Clifford, lives with his owner in Livermore, Calif., in the San Francisco Bay Area. Clifford’s owner, Steve Borba, said he was tired of getting spam e-mails, so he signed up for an e-mail account using the name Clifford J. Dog. Eventually, a pre-approved credit card application arrived addressed to Clifford J. Dog, and Borba sent it in as a joke.

“It asked for his mother’s name. I put ‘Pugsy Malone.’ When it asked for a Social Security number, I put nine zeroes, and I even put that this was for a dog and not to send a credit card,” Borba said.

The credit card company issued Clifford a card despite the obvious warning on the application, Borba said. After the card arrived, Borba alerted the company of the error and the card was deactivated.

Borba said that Clifford never got to use his credit line.