The Page

A friend of Page 9 informs us he’s tired of being asked for ID when he attempts to pay for something in town with his VISA card.
Fed up with the implication that he might be a thief, he’s decided to refuse to provide additional identification, and what’s more, he says, he’s found out that no one has the right to refuse him service if he refuses to provide it.
He’s come up with information that says pretty plainly that VISA, in its contracts with businesses, states that they can’t refuse to make a sale to someone who refuses to show additional ID. Yet this is exactly what a local business did.
If somebody is using a card fraudulently, VISA will pay. Period. That’s what he found out online on a website that busts credit card myths, and it was confirmed, he says, by a Royal Bank VISA rep on the phone.
What the RBC person also told him, was that if he did show his drivers license to a clerk, and that clerk used his VISA number and drivers license number to make fraudulent purchases, “I’d be screwed.” In other words, in that situation, VISA would not pay the shot, as it does otherwise in the case of fraudulent purchases.
The story became more complicated, however, when in another attempt to seek clarification from RBC by phone, the person on the other end could not confirm that RBC’s contract with VISA stipulated that people shouldn’t be asked for additional ID.
It’s a good question why businesses do ask for ID from customers using VISA cards. If VISA always pays anyway, what do they (the business) have to lose by not asking for ID? Or to gain by asking for it. Especially from a 64-year-old gentlemen who has visited the store, he says, “a hundred times.”
In subsequent inquiries, he says VISA made it plain its card carriers have no obligation to offer extra ID. But a third call to RBC resulted in further confusion, when a manager claimed ignorance of any such stipulation by VISA.
Meanwhile, corporate HQ of the Slave Lake store in question has told our contact that they certainly do have the right to ask for ID. In any case, a complaint has been lodged, and we’ll see what develops.
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We had a nice note from Margaret Moore the other day, all the way from Austin Texas, where she and Peter are visiting Peter’s mom Rhoda, but checking in on the news back home via The Leader website. The weather in the Texas capital is around 90 degrees and humid, Magaret says.
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Hey! Why is it so hard to find important phone numbers in the book?
Somebody from High Prairie called us the other day, looking for help in finding the number to the Boreal Centre for Bird Conservation.
‘It’ s not in the phone book,’ he said.
We didn’t know that, but sure enough, it isn’t, at least not in Chamber of Commerce’s community directory (it is in the new Telus book).
‘How about under Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory?’ Nope, that’s not there either.
In the provincial government listings, maybe? No, although there is a main Parks number for Slave Lake, which could get you to the BCBC.
So while we were looking at the government listings, we tried to find a number for ‘Forestry’. No such number for Slave Lake. Athabasca and Whitecourt, but not Slave Lake. What’s up with that?
Sustainable Resource Development then, surely? No such luck. No such listing. There are various sub-departments of SRD listed, but one has to know ahead of time that ‘Lands’, for example, is what the Forestry office in Slave Lake is called, at least in the brains of the government desk jockeys who came up with this brilliant phone listing system. It seems designed to baffle rather than enlighten.
It’s also inconsistent. There’s a listing for ‘Whitecourt Air Tanker Base’, all by itself as if it’s some sort of government department on its own. But no Slave Lake Air Tanker Base. If one, why not the other? Better yet, why aren’t those numbers all listed under an SRD heading?