Day: September 10, 2006

Saturday is really my one day to rest. I work Mondays through Fridays, and I get to slave away on the farm all day on Sundays (and at some points in the year, I’m expected to work on Sundays even after I do the farm thing). Saturday is it for me. This hasn’t been the best Saturday in the world.
I’m trying to install an upgraded WordPress on my site and my FTP client isn’t just rebelling, it’s crashing with enough force to leave a hole in the floor. You can’t just hit the red X and kill it, you have to go to the task manager and kill it. And it crashes doing the damnedest things – it’ll upload a directory with a dozen subdirectories just fine. Ask it to refresh its view of the remote directory? Splat! I’ve been trying to do this for something like four hours now.
I’ve also been eating pizza during that four hours – pizza that was delivered around 7ish PMish. My wife and I each ate a couple of slices when it arrived, and both wound up in digestive distress not very long afterward. She went to bed after that, and I went back to doing whatever the heck it is that I do around here. I ate three slices later, and they didn’t cause me nearly that much trouble. You know what I think the difference was? The grease. The grease ran off into the wax paper in the bottom of the box. So I guess in the future, if I want pizza, I need to order it with about 12 hours’ notice. 😆
One bit of good news so this entry isn’t all grump: I can affirm that the drink seen here, Diet Rite strawberry kiwi, has completely rocked my world all weekend. There’s lots of stuff on the market that purports to be strawberry kiwi flavored, but so often it winds up being a slightly sour strawberry flavor. This drink gets it right on the nose. My wife found a case of this stuff at a local “damaged freight” store – i.e. where some of the local retailers consign stuff that’s been damaged not to the point where it’s unsafe for human consumption, but just to the point that it’s cosmetically imperfect. (We shop there a lot.) The price averaged out to a few cents a can. I hope they get some more of this in soon, or maybe Wal-Mart will start carrying the stuff – it’s mighty tasty.
OK, now back to my final rant of the night, as I kill WS_FTP in the task manager again. 🙄 For reasons that some of my closer friends know right now (and reasons that I don’t plan on going into in a public blog, at least not for a while), I don’t exactly love the institution of the bank right now. In fact, I’m getting close to hating banks, everywhere, period. I don’t have a problem with the people who are just doing their jobs there, but whoever the ones are in the head office who are coming up with ways to bilk us, those are the ones who need to die several nasty deaths over a painfully protracted period of time. My wife and I have three accounts at our bank – one is more or less her “vehicle fund,” for fueling, maintaining and insuring her personal vehicle, which she also uses heavily at work. One is the joint account which pays our bills. The third is mine, though it’s also referred to as the “site account” – any revenue from the website goes in there, and any expenses on the website’s behalf come out of there, but that account also fuels up the car I drive and occasionally feeds me. (Not that I’m making enough dough every quarter from Amazon to do that – a portion of each of my paychecks also goes in there. 😆 )
Anyway, here’s the deal. I need gas. The kind I can’t get from eating greasy pizza. I’m going to need it tomorrow. There’s about four bucks left in my account. That won’t cut it. So, after making sure my wife knew about it, I got online and moved about $35 over to my account from the joint account, and went and put the gas on my debit card. Well, okay, I put it in my gas tank but paid for it with my debit card. No sweat, eh? Just the way it’s supposed to be. Not so fast! I checked my balance online tonight, and saw that I’ve drawn an NSF for that gas – apparently the $35 won’t “officially” be moved until Monday. Which is “officially” bullcrap. That just negated the entire point of online banking. I would’ve been better off writing a check which couldn’t be deposited until Monday. But it sure as hell made the bank $25 for an NSF fee, didn’t it?
Oh, wait. Writing a check won’t always do it either. I used to have the “site account” at an entirely different account until they instituted a hairbrained policy whereby, when a check comes to them for payment, they don’t pay it against the balance in your account at that moment – they backdate it and use the balance that was in your account on the date that’s written on the check. So, for example, I write a check Thursday night for an amount that would cause an NSF, except that payday is on Friday, the check won’t hit the bank until Friday at the earliest, so I’m okay, right? Wrong! The bank backdates the $20 check to Thursday, sees that I only had $10 in the account on Thursday (never mind that there’s $70 there now), and uses that as an excuse to steal $25 from me. Oops, so sorry, charges me a $25 NSF fee.
I think you can see why I closed the account at that bank. And why I now want to close an account at this one and just start keeping it all in a frakkin’ jar under the bed.
Don’t get me wrong, folks, living beyond your means is bad – a highway to hell paved in bling that you couldn’t afford in the first place. I’ve always tried to play by that rule and not overextend myself, at least not for something completely frivolous. But every once in a great while, you have to play a game of “float the check” that should be resolved by the start of the next business day; I know that the days of doing that are numbered, with the rise of the debit card, smart cards, and even doing instant electronic funds withdrawal via check, so we might as well get used to it. But it looks like we also might as well get used to the high probability that someone at the corporate level of the banks with whom we do business is actively dreaming up ways to make up their own shortfalls – due to a dropoff in the loan business with rising interest rates – by getting it from the little guy any way they possibly can.
Maybe they wouldn’t be seeing a dropoff in business if they’d show even a modicum of respect for their customers.… Read more