The Dark Knight, Identity Theft, and Me…

  

July 18th, 2008.

Geeks know the date, it’s like December 25th or July 4th.

July 17th, by the way, will suck an awful lot. You know why? Because you know that if you just go to sleep, you’ll wake up to the gift of Batman.  

If you’re like me, however, you don’t need sleep. If you are a real geek, then you are probably going to be at a Thursday night midnight showing. I will be… oh, wait, I was going to be.

I was going to see it in style, too, in glorious IMAX at Universal’s CityWalk Stadium 19. I was totally prepared to have my mind blown right out my ass by the most pulverizing presentation of ‘The Dark Knight’ that you can experience. It’s all I could think about at work, and buying tickets is so easy. All you have to do is go online, get out that credit card and-

My phone rings while I’m at work. I don’t recognize the number, but I answer anyway.  

“Is this Nicholas Day,” asks the stranger?

“Yes it is,” says I.

“Nicholas, I am calling you from Capital One Visa’s fraud department. Did you recently make a purchase of $2,500.00 with your Capital One Visa card?”

“What?”

You see, I made no such purchase, but it turns out that someone in India did. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if the person(s) had spent the $2,500 on ‘Dark Knight’ tickets, but when I asked where my money went, the nice guy from the fraud department rattled off a name that sounded vaguely porn-ish.

So, my credit card account was frozen, and I was to receive a new card with a new number. That was Tuesday morning of last week. Last week was also when tickets for ‘Dark Knight’ midnight screenings went on sale. Naturally, those IMAX midnight tickets sold out immediately, because LA is jam packed with geeks. There’s a 3:15AM screening, but LA has enough geeks to sell out that show, too.

I got my new credit card in the mail yesterday. Tickets for July 18th ‘Dark Knight’ screenings are on sale. There is an IMAX screening at 9:15AM that day.

Guess who’ll be showing up three hours late to work…