I can’t do anything on a normal scale. If I’m going to do anything, usually anything that is painful or mildly criminal, I’m going to throw myself completely into it face first and usually end up injured in some way.

This week, I received a garbled voicemail from some federal whatever unit of the federal whatever department OF MY BANK. There’s no better feeling than standing in your classroom holding a cell phone that you can’t talk on and seeing the voice-to-speech message that says something or other about your bank account. I had to wait two hours to figure out what happened.

I got in touch with the lovely young man from the federal something-or-other who informed me that there were fraudulent charges on my bank account. My first panic-stricken thought was, “No, those charges for three dildos and 16 pounds of asparagus are legitimate. They’re medicinal.” He asked me to verify my identity by giving him my social security number, which I COMPLETELY REFUSED TO DO BECAUSE I’M NOT STUPID.

“Ma’am, I’m calling you from your own bank. I already have your social security number. I’m just making sure you’re the real person I should be talking to. Seriously, I’m looking at every bit of personal private information you could possibly have.”

I, however, work in a jail and I’m not about to speak my blood type, let alone my social security number. We finally met in the middle. He would say the first letter or number of my address, and I would say the second, and then he would say the third, then I would say the fourth, etc. Why yes, as a matter of fact, it was my plan, why do you ask?

And it turns out there was actually one very serious fraudulent charge on my account: to J-Date, for $1.

I suddenly felt really, really bad for a lonely Jewish man who was staying up late looking for love and trying to get his overbearing mom off his back. He probably just transposed two numbers when he was typing in the info, probably from the sheer giddiness of meeting the girl of his Hebrew dreams on the internet. And besides, who steals your credit card info and charges $1 to it? If I managed to figure out how to get someone’s financial information, I’d be drunk at the beach before the payment finished processing.

I asked the very weirded-out man from the federal whatever if we could just let that charge go. He was very confused, and the more I tried to explain it to him, the more confused he got. I don’t think he’s very good at his job.

I’ve had a number of male Jewish friends over the years tell me they wore fake wedding rings just to go grab some milk at the grocery store to avoid being swarmed. My logic is, if this poor man is having to resort to meeting girls via a Jewish dating service then he either a) lives in a part of the country with zero other Jewish people or b) he’s just utterly hopeless at meeting people.

So I was all for letting the charge stand, and setting a limit of like fifty bucks. This poor man needs lovin’ and I shudder to think what will happen if J-Date rejects him because his credit card was invalid. Sadly, the bank said it doesn’t work that way, even after I strongly hinted that I could not conduct my personal financial business with an institution that was so obviously anti-Semitic. And anti-dating.