This morning a fresh batch of technology devices landed at the Apple store. This included the magic trackpad and a slick, energy efficient battery charger. Who can resist?

Plus I had a couple of gift cards around that had small balances and Apple is good about allowing multiple cards on a single order. Well sort of. So everything went well and the order went in this morning. This afternoon, however, the word came there was a problem.

When you order at Apple online they run a $1 pre-authorization for your card to make sure it's good. When they did this with the gift card it's available $7 balance was reduced to $6 so when they tried to run it for $7 later the charge failed. Oy!

This is actually something to consider when giving a credit card gift-card. The sentiment is nice and there is a lot of flexibility, but it's also very hard to use them up. Surely the credit card companies understand this and are counting on the leftovers. It's one thing if it's a single-store card and they can use it all up for you. But with the credit-card varieties there is no easy way to have a store check the balance and run just that much for you on that card.

Update: I left the call described above being told it would take half an hour to clear up. Of course hours later nothing had changed. A call back and one more trip through an annoying automated phone tree (which directed me to Mac upgrade group instead of the store group I called) and it took just a few minutes to have the whole thing cleared up. Moral of the day is don't hang up till it's taken care of.