Yeah, I've run into this exact problem before with my credit card... Being a student at a large university requires one to wait in line for ungodly amounts of time to get the priveledge of spending insane amounts of money on textbooks. Last semester, after waiting for forty five minutes, Visa's system was down and couldn't verify my credit card so instead of approving the purchase, they declined it... Of course, at this point, the bookstore wouldn't let me pay by check because they assumed those were bad as I admited they were linked to the same account. (won't do that again) I called my bank and complained, and they said the transaction had never even reached them and there was nothing they could have done...

Matthew