Saturday evening I got a phone call. It’s from an 866 number so I let it go to voice mail. Well, it’s AmEx saying they’ve made an important change to my account and I needed to call them back right away.

Curious, I log into my account to find that my available credit had gone from something over $10,000 to $15. Needless to say, I was pissed. It wasn’t so much that they had cut my credit line (again), but they had cut it so low that the next month’s interest charges (in the neighborhood of $30) would have pushed the account over the credit limit and ding! over limit fee! and ding! penalty interest rates!

So I called them to find out what the hell and demand they at least raise it $200 to cover coming interest charges and some charges I had made that day. (Did I mention the call came at 5:25pm?) They insisted my only recourse was to make a second payment this month to cover the coming charges. Never mind that I had already posted a payment for this month (a week early). Never mind that it was 10x more than the required minimum payment. Never mind that it was almost 2x more than charges I had actually made to the account this month.

To add insult to injury, they tried to blame me. “We have concerns about your ability to repay the balance.” Bullshit. Since when have credit cards of any kind been about repaying the balance? As long as you make your monthly payments and don’t go over your limit, they don’t care. In fact, that’s the f—ing business model! This is not about me. This is about them throwing a credit card at every Tom, Dick and Harry with a mailbox and following up with “convenience checks” to what? Encourage people to run up a balance. This is about them making bad investments and shitty business decisions and suddenly not having the assets to cover all the loans and generous credit limits they’ve been handing out for the last ten years.

I get it. They have their balls in a vice and they need to get their outstanding loans more in line with the current value of what assets they have left. I get that a credit line counts against their balance sheet, even if it’s not currently in use. If they had cut a few grand off my limit like they did last year, or even if they had only left me with a few hundred dollars, I would have just rolled my eyes and gone on paying off the card. If they had been willing to listen to reason from a customer who has a long and excellent payment history, I would have been fine. If they had even taken the time to tell me the available balance stated on the web site included authorizations that had been made on the account, but which had not yet cleared (ie. the charges I had made that day) and a small payment of $20 would be sufficient to keep my account from going into penalty status, I might have been mollified. But no. Not only did they try and get me to pay off half the balance of the card (if I could afford to do that, don’t you think I would??), they deliberately set up a situation that would have pushed my account into penalty status if I hadn’t been paying attention, or hadn’t received the phone call, or had been away from the Internet or for any other reason been unable to make an extra payment.

They also didn’t choose me because of their “concerns about my ability to repay.” They chose me because they knew they could probably squeeze me for some extra cash. If my credit rating was already in the toilet, I’d have nothing to lose by telling them to go to hell. If I didn’t have an excellent payment history, they wouldn’t have risked my not being able to make future payments. Essentially, they did this precisely because I’m a reliable customer.

Bastards.