By Mabel Doge Luhan
Oh what a scorching week I’ve had!
His name: Ricardo. Ricardo’s eyes: cool granite. Ricardo’s hair: the deep brown of Rafet’s panties when he hears police sirens.
That sweltering May evening, Ricardo’s muscles undulated under my wrinkled hands as I begged for him to continue performing an act so unspeakably pleasurable that I can only refer to it as The Moroccan Tree Goat—
When all of a sudden, Ricardo stopped mid-thrust, squeezed out a crocodile tear, and announced that my time was up. But he offered to spend the rest of the night with me for a mere $500!
You didn’t think at my age, I was getting that for free, did you?
Some offers, I can’t refuse! I pantomimed to Ricardo (my darling speaks less English than Bryan Manabat!) to stay put in the penthouse suite I’d rented us at Saipan Vegas. Immediately, I Tasered my wheelman awake and made a beeline for the Bank of Hawaii ATM in Chalan Laulau.
All that stood between me and a million little deaths was five hundred dollars cash!
This ATM is temporarily out of service.
Oh, but they have another ATM! Behind closed doors, available only during bankers’ hours.
Well, fine. I keep a few million in my FHB account for emergencies like this, so I had the wheelman activate the emergency flashers — this was an EMERGENCY — and speed me to the FHB on Chalan Laulau, the one that’s about to close down! And one ATM was broken, while the other one was out of cash.
I wouldn’t allow my evening to be ruined, and while I won’t go into detail about how I got that $500, let’s just say that what we buy, we sometimes sell, and in the alley behind the Bank of Guam, those $20s add up pretty quickly.
That very next morning, Ricardo had to hightail it back to Tenerife: to continue his mission of saving blind puppies and curing cancer, he assured me. It was a tearful goodbye we had at the Saipan Airport, and even if I didn’t have an extra $4 to give him to buy a bottle of water, at least I left him with my very own bar of soap, since the Saipan airport bathrooms don’t have any.
It was a cold and lonely return back to my villa in Kagman V, with only the sound of falcons frolicking in their quarters and my footman’s absolutely repulsive snoring. I didn’t miss Ricardo. Well parts of him I did miss. But not him qua him.
What I did miss was the ability to withdraw cash from an ATM, which I was pretty sure both BOH and FHB had promised me! It wasn’t the first time all their Saipan ATMs were broken, and certainly not the first time I’d have to pay $4.25 to some shady ATM to “use an out of network card” (for which that other bank already pays them, by the way), and then against $5 to my own dear BOH or FHB to “use an out of network ATM” (isn’t that the very point of an ATM network?), and all within view of their always broken company ATMs.
Well, I knew that in the CNMI we have vigorous enforcement of consumer regulations, and an Attorney General’s office that is always working to protect consumers! Why, our stores always have prices posted, and our rental listings never have blatantly discriminatory conditions! And if our Attorney General didn’t go after those miscreants, why, our public-spirited newspapermen always will!
CHARIZZ! We don’t have any of that! But what we do have is Mabel, and the Feds! And that’s even better than an AG’s office that cares about consumers or newspapers that can see past their paymasters’ pubes.
I’m here to introduce you to my little friend Mister Quaalude — no, wait, wrong friend. I’m here to introduce you to my little friend Miss CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It’s a federal agency that retail banks are so scared of that they’ve been lobbying for a decade to get it defunded. It’s a federal agency that’s so good for consumers that Donald Dump gave it a yearly budget of $1 (I’m not joking about that)!
And they, unlike the CNMI Attorney General’s office, will go to bat for you against your bank, when your bank doesn’t fulfill its end of the bargain with you. When they don’t do what they promised, when they don’t give you what they were supposed to give you, or when they just make things unreasonably difficult for you.
Now, they’re not like Rafet’s foot soldiers. They won’t just file a false sexual harassment complaint against someone, or try to tear apart someone’s family, just because someone told them to do it. They’re no like that. You do need to show them that you made a reasonable attempt to resolve the problem yourself. Save your logs of who you talked to and when. But once you have that, they will rip FHB or BOH to shreds for you, and for free!
Most importantly, they will go after not only banks, but any collection agencies, or anyone calling themselves a collection agency. Did you know that it’s illegal for anyone to threaten to defame you at work by sending a bill collector there? Or that collection agencies have to stop contacting you immediately whenever you ask them to? Most people in Saipan don’t know that, and the banks and collection agencies certainly don’t want you to know that. The CFPB is here to school you, and to do the enforcement work that our own government won’t do.
Here’s their website: https://www.consumerfinance.
Isn’t the federal government wonderful?
But wait: there’s more!
What about our internet and phone providers, the very well-connected (get it?) ones that keep our prices high and our speeds low? There’s a fed for that! You can complain about them to the FCC:
https://consumercomplaints.
In Tagalog: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/
In Chinese: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/
That includes internet that never works, repairs that never happen, overcharging, mystery charges, disappearing phone loads, and everything else we love in the CNMI!
Now you might think I’m being a bit of a hypocrite, as didn’t I recently pillory Glenn Danzig for his petition to sic the CNMI government on United Airlines? Yes, yes I did pillory him (my, how I’d love to), but that was because United hadn’t cheated us in any way — and what he was suggesting was sending an infamously shakedown-loving CNMI government after them, in some unspecified kind of “regulatory action.” All I’m suggesting here is reporting our corporate miscreants to existing federal regulatory bodies, ones I can tell you from professional experience don’t call up companies doing business in the CNMI and asking for free meals and tickets and jobs for relatives.
So open a new browser tab already, and let’s put the fear of Mabel in them!
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Mabel Doge Luhan is a woman of loose morals. She resides in Kagman V, where she pursues her passions of crocheting, beatboxing, and falconry.
