Marathon Man

my few/rare occasions doing this have NOT been worthy.

in the office of one bank manager, I told them a brief idea of what I did to get the coins/miles and her reply was: "Well, since our bank doesn't want to handle these and there are costs in our doing so, someone has to foot the bill. If you say you are getting free miles for it, the it's time you pay instead of somebody else." With that, I walked out and have never been to that branch again--although I deposit elsewhere in the same bank.

Another bank said the same basic thing with a reply such as, "so you are getting rewards out of it? Well nothing is for 100% free, so you gotta pay sometime."

that one reminded me of the time I called an airline about a problem with an award ticket and the agent's comment was something like, "well, it was free, so why are you complaining?"

As we all know in here, NOTHING about doing coins for miles is really FREE. There is WORK involved.

Other bank employees who have either no concept of how FFPs work or would think of them as scams and schemes they'd never do will glare at you with discontent should you let them in on the secrets of our world. They just DO NOT get it. It's like trying to justify to most cops that going 42 in a 40 should be OK. You kinda gotta let THEM make that call--always.

I also fear that if I were to tell the tale of miles and mint to some of the more straight laced/self righteous types of bank-esque people in the world, one of them would get into that psuedo moral/ethical debate with me about all of it (intent of the program, use of the credit card, use of banks, income, taxes, etc--things that we have all understood but they do not but think they do) and one of them might even CALL the mint to try to put a stop to it or at least put something in motion.

I have seen people like that try to stop you from doing things just because they feel they must. It is often human nature for some people to try to prevent another from gaining something just, well, because. And they may see US as gaining something they think we should not gain.

I have therefore concluded that there is no benefit in telling anyone below say a VP of a bank or some high level security officer exactly HOW or WHY we do this stuff. If I am ever at that level I might tell that person but it has not happened yet. For those people, it would in fact ease their minds as to what's going on with all the money, and then they should have no problem with it, but for everyone below, it just confuses them and embarrasses you. After all, they think we are weird.