Dramatic post title aside, please lend me your ears (eyes) and advice!
On 7/31 I was trying to be a good Mustachian by filling out my Simple IRA shit. I had the form filled out with the following info:
- My SSN
- DH SSN
- Our Birthdates
- Our Address
- Our Names
Our HR person told me apparently ONLY I could mail it to the investment firm, so I dutifully made copies. Because we work in an open-ish office, I shoved them into my notebook before hurrying to my next meeting. The name and title of the forms could be read at the top, I believe, but for obvious reasons I made sure my other info was obscured.
Well.
I had to head home from the office to pick up a prescription. My plan was then to work from home - this made me rush, since I live an hour away and had to be at my home by a certain hour for a meeting that just HAD to be lead by me. By the time I got home, led my meeting, and finished the tasks for my day, I realized that, to my horror, I had left the forms on my desk. I checked my purse to be sure. I hadn’t put the forms in there and they weren’t on my desktop or table.
It was after hours, so reaching my colleagues was pretty much out of the question (Fridays during the summer tends to mean that people leave at 5 on the dot). I thought about heading back into the city, but given the time, the cleaning crew had already gone through. I figured that if they were going to be stolen, they’d already have been. I crossed my fingers for Monday.
The forms were gone.
I doubted myself for two weeks, hoping they would show up at home. They have not. I’ve asked the two people with whom I share a rather large rectangular space, and they swear they didn’t accidentally grab them with their papers.
After crying about it and not sleeping for about 3 days, I set up credit monitoring through a service that covers all three bureaus and also monitors identity theft risk for both me and DH [$30 per mo, FUUU]
Here are my questions:
- How screwed am I and why?
- What can I do about being so screwed so that I ultimately AM NOT SCREWED?
- Do you have any stories of reassurance that my life will not be usurped and thoroughly destroyed by this mistake?
- Resources on identity theft say that I should submit a police report. I have no evidence that it’s been stolen except my admittedly shoddy memory. Do I still submit a report?
- Do I ask HR to get in touch with the building and look at security cams?
- One of my goals is to try to get a free trip via CC travel-hacking. Can I still do this or will it fuck me up in the case that some other a-hole is trying to open cards on my name, too?
Disclaimer: While I always appreciate a warranted face punch, I cannot underscore how stressed out this whole situation has made me and, rest assured, this event in my life will now make me even more organized than I have ever been. Given that I am an obsessive compulsive, you can imagine just how organized that may be. In other words, if you can find it in your mustachian hearts: be gentle.