Tiny Bubbles...

...in the lake, although in the actual song the '"tiny bubbles" are in the wine, and trust me, I could have used some bubbly wine today.
Yesterday we got a bill in the mail for Tom's last hospitalization, which was strange because I had already sent a check to the hospital to pay the bill. So I went online to my banking account and the check had been cashed on the 20th., so I called the billing office to tell them that. They looked and looked and couldn't find a record of the payment, so gave me their email address and said just to send proof of payment and they'd fix it. So imagine my surprise when I went back into my account and clicked on the check number so that the image of the check would come up, & there was my actual check, but it was no longer made out to the hospital. The date had been changed to Sept. 20th., it was now made out to some man I've never heard of, the amount of the check had been changed to $4,500 and it was quite obviously NOT my signature, especially given that it was signed as Diana rather than Diane & the last name was misspelled as well. But it had been cashed. So I ran off a copy of it and went to the bank. The lady I talked to said she'd never seen this before and didn't know what to do (in her defense, she was new in her job), so she took me upstairs to the bank Vice President, who filled out a fraud claim for me. He told me that people can "wash" a check & then re-fill in the lines--but said this was really brazen that the person raised the amount by so much, since they generally try to change as little as possible. Brian (the VP) said just to be on the safe side, since checking account numbers are on the bottom of checks, they'd open up a new checking account for me and get me new checks and a new debit card to go with it. They can't close out my old account yet because I have a few outstanding checks, but they transferred out all but the money needed for the outstanding checks into the new account. He said I'll get the $4,500 dollars back but he doesn't know how long that will take, as their fraud dept. will have to investigate the whole thing. Now I have to contact my pension company and social security so they can change my automatic deposits to the new account......I've already got a headache just THINKING about it because no doubt it'll entail at least an hour & a half on "hold" waiting for assistance.  Add to that Tom still being so tired out & not feeling well, and his hip has been very painful since they did the bone marrow biopsy yesterday. I have to say I've had better days. :)