A week ago, I went to Betty’s Eat Inn (Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz) with my daughter. When I got the bill, I gave them my credit card but then never got it back, and so walked out without it. The next day I called the restaurant. They had the card, and I told them I’d come to pick it up. I didn’t make it there on Thursday, but on Friday when I went I was told that they had destroyed my card.

I’m still processing what happened. I called. They knew that I knew the card was missing. They knew that I knew they had it and that I wanted it back. And they destroyed it.

The last time I had to get a new credit card, I found out a few things. I found out that my husband and I don’t just share an account, we share an actual card – our cards have the same number, etc. This makes it tough if, for instance, I want to use Paypal. You can’t have more than one account with the same card number, and he updated his with the new card first. I also found out that in some instances if you have a service that’s automatically billing your card and you switch cards, they may skip a single auto-billing. You’ll end up having a late fee (unless you’re me and pitch a fit about it). Most of our bills are on auto-pay, and every single one of those accounts would have to be manually changed over to the new account number.

I called the restaurant again to find out what happened. The woman I talked to said that she had spoken to the manager and that my card had been destroyed. She said that she understood it was upsetting, that it was all a misunderstanding. She said that the manager would call me on Monday (yesterday) because they wanted to “make this right.” Nobody called me.

What does “making it right” look like? In a case when you’ve accidentally done someone an injury that can’t be fixed with money (replacing something broken, etc.) how do you make it right? I don’t want vouchers for free food at a restaurant where the staff has done something to harm me. I don’t want to make friends with someone to reward them for having screwed me. It’s out of the question to have someone else go through my accounts and undertake the tedious work of both getting the new card and fixing the accounts that use that card.

I’m sure that a lot of people have had similar problems. Someone has done something to you that they can’t fix. How do you handle it? How do you gracefully get through it without letting yourself be made bitter at people’s incompetence? How do you allow the other person to atone for their actions without unfairly hanging a millstone of guilt around their neck. That gets to the crux of the matter. If you’ve done something wrong, you want to be able to apologize, be forgiven, and get back to okay as quickly as possible. But what if the thing you’ve done has long-term consequences? What if the thing you’ve done comes back to haunt the other person for months or years? How long do you have to keep apologizing for the same sin? When I look at it like that, I come up with a very different answer.

What’s right? Who’s right?

UPDATE: I happened to be having lunch on Pacific Avenue again today, and afterward I stopped by Betty’s to see if the manager would talk to me. He did, and he was just short of hostile in his condescension. His attitude was “I cut it up and now it’s gone. What do you want me to do about it?” Not “I’m sorry that I’ve just caused you a huge headache.” He consistently blamed everyone else on his staff (an action that always sticks in my craw). What’s worse, he and the assistant manager acted really strange about the whole thing. I asked them if there was a particular card that was different than the others. No, they didn’t think so. Really? No, they were all just regular cards. Except that mine was a Chase Sapphire Preferred card. They’re made of metal and so can’t just be put through a shredder or cut with scissors. You would notice if you were trying to snip one of these. And yet, nope, there was no problem with any of them.

The whole thing is beginning to sound suspicious to me.