Gods at the credit card company, otherwise known as the customer service agents

I have two charge cards that I rarely use but I most likely opened because I wanted to get an on the spot 20%, you know the routine. Let's call this store I am going to talk about Ann Taylor xxdanger.

That being said I guess I should remind myself that I was *using* them initially. Karma is a bitch.

I'm pretty steady at paying off the plastic; I use my regular cc to keep track of everything I spend, and rarely carry cash. Now these other "charge cards" I almost never use, but sometimes there is a coupon you can use if you charge your card, so I think this was the reason I put something on my xxdangercard, and it happened to be a blazer I needed for a conference. Total on the card 35 dollars (coupons=occasionally amazing). In all the rigamaroll of needing the blazer under a time crunch, I forgot I charged it.

Fast forward to apparently over a month later, I pay off my account, 60 dollars. Fine. Then rifling though the HUGE stack of junk mail, I happened to open a letter from xxdanger card member services about how I had not paid on time and hence the fee, back dated a few weeks. What fee? I look online and they had Late fee-ed me $25. Wow, big fee for my cheap blazer. So being the economical xx I am, and taking advice both from my mother and Suze, I called xxdanger customer service up.

Me: "I've been a good customer for X years, and I would like you to waive the fee. "

"Ok we can waive half of it for you" cause that makes sense?, so I ask to talk to the manager.

Manager: "Hello how are you blah blah blah, actually we can't waive any of it, our systems will not allow us to credit you because you already paid the bill, and you can't have a negative balance"

Now to an unsuspecting person any of these reasons might sound reasonable -- if the first woman hadn't offered to waive 1/2 of the 25$ fee.

So I push a little more. "So why did the last woman say she could credit me?"

Silence. We're at an impasse. She starts in, repeating what she had just said.

Now if anything I stick to principles. "Okay, I would like to close the account"

Manager: "Uhm hold on ma'am", I think the putting on hold is the last form of power these people have to exert.

Next thing I know: "Ma'am would you be willing to keep the account open if we waived the fee?" DUH. That's why I called.

Fee cleared. Apparently they changed their "systems" while they had me on hold.