Thursday, November 10, 2011

Stinking Credit Card Colors

You’d think one of the great joys in my life is to look in my wallet and see lots of pictures of Green dead Presidents. Yes, stacks of cash are a step above the obligatory lint balls, expired McDonalds Monopoly pieces, and torn n’ tattered school pix from when my kid was half her current age. But the real highlight of my low-life, faux-leather ’billy-fold’, is my true-blue credit card, used to plump up my ‘piggy’ with pennies from every purchase.

Oh sure, I conceal and carry the Crayola collection of ‘CRUDit’ cards in every conceivable shade of the rainbow. However, most of that collective credit patina simply props up my pocket, and evens-out the lopsided cellulite bulges when I frequently ‘turn the other cheek’. Who knows what any of these credit colors mean anymore anyway? When I was a mere pup, if you were lucky enough to have a ‘free’ credit card, it was a utilitarian, dirty gray short & fat springy plastic bookmark. If the banking gods deemed you and your big ‘snob-shot’ salary worthy, you might also get to possess that other card – the enviable holy grail of true credit worthiness . . . a glistening GOLD-COLORED slab o’ plastic.

But these days everybody gets offers for Platinum, Emerald, Sapphire, and Slate colored credit cards which up until now, I had always thought were just geological structures rather than actual colors. I even recently saw a politically incorrect ‘Black-faced’ credit card, tap-dancing around premium exclusivity, rather than the more realistic ‘black hole’ VACUUM of debt, which drains your veins faster than ‘Drac’ if you’re careless. Unless he’s kissing his own glossy promo headshot, NOBODY - not even that irritating, diminutively-domed Dyson inventor-dude, wants to face THAT KIND of a sickening sucking sound.

Regardless of your favorite tint, whatever color these cards start out as, they can all bleed gallons of red ink if used indiscriminately. That’s why I always wondered why can’t somebody make credit cards out something REALLY practical like beef jerky or thin-sliced Velveeta cheese? Then at least when you get in a little over your ‘credit –head’, you can still ‘eat ‘em up’ BEFORE your creditors bestow the same favor upon you. Hmmm, maybe not such a great idea to fill my hot wallet with perishable cheesy credit cards though? I clearly don’t need additional reasons to be the ‘butt’ of my family’s hairy, old n’ moldy ‘STINK’ jokes!