Well, lucky me, today I got to put a fraud alert on my credit report. I got a letter from a credit card company saying that a laptop owned by a company they had sold my information to contained "certain summary information." Well, this information includes my name, address, phone numbers - oh and my SOCIAL SECURITY number. So, no problem there.

However, I will say, that this company (RBS Mastercard) has been very responsive and has arranged for everyone who was on this list to get a free year of credit monitoring from a company, and the letter gave instructions on how to put a fraud alert on your account.

I guess you have to be very careful about such things because of the whole identity theft thing, which is much more involved than someone just getting credit cards in your name and running them up, which is horrible enough. But I guess the worry is the additional things they can do once they have your social security number. Until the last few years I never knew this was such a big deal.

Remember the first day of college, when if you didn't know your SS number when you arrived, you did by the time you finished registration because it was how everyone identified you? Of course, it wasn't too hard to find because it was right there on top of your ACT/SAT print out, as well as your preliminary registration, and every other piece of paper you were clutching as you went through the system. And, gosh it was just a very short time ago it was on everyone's drivers licenses.

This is the fourth such letter I've gotten in the last few months about similar instances. I've had to get a new debit card and pin number, which was a mess, because of a security breach. I've had two other letters like this one, although those companies did nothing other than inform us. I wonder if it's happening more or if companies are just covering their butts more.

I feel bad for the employee who had the laptop stolen out of his/her car. I'm sure they feel bad about all this. And, yet, it's one of those things you can say, "geez, they should have known better..." but I've done so many things in my life that could have turned out badly and I was just lucky they didn't. So, I'm cutting them some slack.