I got a response to a resume on Monday. It was a hotel maintenance job which I’m not really enthusiastic about because hotels typically don’t pay for shit. Which kinda sucks because hotels (you’ll note I didn’t say “hospitality”) is probably the industry I have the most experience in and the environment I’m one I’m generally interested in because, y’know, the asshole customers leave.

So the response was an email asking me to call the guy, the head tech or chief engineer or whatever, on his cell. I complied but the message said he was on vacation and didn’t give me the option of leaving a voice mail. Not a great sign. So I reply to the email, blah blah blah.

He calls this morning, wants to know where I’m at, what I’m looking for, all that jazz. At some point, in the midst of complaining that people in the NW are too laid back and more interested in the not working parts of their lives than in the working parts (more on that later) he mentions they want someone who can move up. Which causes alarm on my end because, well, I think most of you know me, or have met me, do I seem like management material to you?

So I work in to my end that I’m not interested in climbing the corporate ladder. That catches his attention and he asks me to expand on the theme. Well, sir (I didn’t say that, of course), all I want from a job is 40 hours a week (although if you want to give me some time and half I’ll take it), regular paychecks (hopefully every other week) and for it to leave me the fuck alone. Admittedly maintenance was kind of a bad choice for that last as someone’s usually on call.

But what I don’t want from a job is to deal with other people’s bullshit. Including the HR department, performance reviews, discipline and budgets and whiners. And meetings. Oh, shit do I ever want to minimize meetings. So, no promotions for me, thank you. I work, you pay me, the end.

I paraphrase that to him, of course. He then says they’re looking for someone who wants all that, so thanks for your interest blahblahblah, see ya later.

WTF? What was all that about? Were they really hiring for an assistant manager?? What bullshit. The pay was merely bad, not insulting like some (I was once offered the grand sum of nine dollars an hour for a hotel gig), but the line earlier about people in the northwest being too laid back is what really makes me think I wouldn’t have been about working for this guy/company. Why wouldn’t I be more interested in the leisure part of my life than the working part? An employer is someone who pays you because they have to, if they could find a way to do away with a body they will. So fuck them. The gold watch and pension mentality has left their end so the work ’til you drop mentality has sure as fuck left mine.

Bleagh!

Heed!, originally uploaded by JW Doom.

The sign lays it out, homes.

Yesterday I get an email that my account is overdrawn. I look online and see that I wrote a check for rent and forgot to transfer in the money to cover it. My bad. I freely admit my error and was fully expecting to be hit with a fee.

This morning I get an email that my account is overdrawn. I’d covered the transfer and I had about $13 left in my account, of which I spent about $10 last night but my unemployment insurance direct deposit should have hit. Confused, I go to the website. My balance is around $200, about half what it should be on dole day. I click to see account activity.

$136 overdraft fee.

One hundred thirty six dollar overdraft fee.

After I get over staring at my iPhone in shock I of course get angry. By the time I get home to my iMac where I can click the link (there’s a digression there about the Chase website, I’ll put it at the end) I’ve got a pretty good head of steam built up. Then I see that it’s rather four overdraft fees for four overdrawn transactions. Each one helpfully listed.

Three of these were not overdrawn yesterday. Because I looked. I monitor my bank activity pretty closely via the Chase website and these three transactions were already on my account when the rent check was processed (the rent check itself is the fourth overdrawn transaction). Today when I look, sure enough, every transaction within a day is now sorted in descending order by amount.

Which comes to one of the big screws of commercial banking. Chase, at least, processes big transactions first. Which they say is because big transactions are more likely to be important, car payments, rent, etc and it’s more important those go through. Baloney! When have bankers ever really cared about their customers’ convenience? Where did the term “banker’s hours” come from, because banks fall over themselves to help us out? Horse puckey! It’s so they can ding you for fees by overdrawing the account with big transactions first, then hitting you every time you get coffee or a beer or a taco. They know a lot of people lead cash-free lives and they work it for their bonuses and stock price. They also know this is b.s., because they’re stopping it. Some time next year.

So Chase is keeping $136. As I indicated above, I’m unemployed. Unemployment insurance has an expiration date and the job market in Portland is famously bad. I can’t just cover things out of savings when some day those savings might be all that’s keeping me from homelessness, or living with Mom again. All of this was caused in large part by Washington Mutual, now a part of Chase Bank! The screw has now come full circle.

Now another corporate screw, which goes beyond banks. The only way I’m going to get any satisfaction is to yell at some CSR. I hate yelling at front line employees. Give me a manager or partner, someone with authority and I’ll vocally add proverbial orifices to their body and smile afterward. But of course they hide behind their probably literally poor, overworked, overstressed pawns.

But they’re not keeping over a quarter of my weekly income. So I formulate a plan. First, I’d been a customer of WaMu for a long time, and I’ve stuck with Chase. I deserve better treatment than this. Second, three of these fees were because of your accounting shenanigans. The damage is far beyond my fault. Now, I want some of the fees refunded or I’m gone. I’m not going to argue, I’m not going to debate. Fix it, or you’ve got one less customer maintaining a decent balance. If you can’t do that, give me to someone who can.

It turns out Chase has a “goodwill” fee refund policy. What. The. (expletive deleted)? They know they’re screwing us, so they’ve come up with a policy to throw us a bone! But no more than once every twelve months. This “goodwill” refund is up to $70. I’d set my price at $100, but like I said I hate yelling at CSRs so I waffled and took it. I wonder now if that was planned, if they hired some shrink to ask how to defuse people like me.

But there’s more. Because of their fee I was overdrawn again, even with my UI direct deposit (I can’t see on their site what times those transactions came in but who wants to guess they process fees before deposits?). So there are more fees coming. The CSR couldn’t reverse a fee that hadn’t been assessed yet, so I have to call back tomorrow to take care of that. When I do I must talk to a supervisor because I’ve already used my goodwill refund and the CSR admitted whoever I get tomorrow will go to some lengths to avoid escalating my call.

I hate banks. I hate corporations. I hate corporate banks.

Okay, the website digression. Chase’s website sucks. There’s no way to get additional information about particular transactions from the site. WaMu’s website (which was also bad) had it, the description of each line item was a hyperlink. It didn’t give a lot of information, but you could get some. Chase, nothing. Except for on checks and overdraft fees.

This might not be specific to the website, but I hate the way Chase does transactions, particularly ones with tips. WaMu would list such transactions as pending until they’d been finally processed by the merchant with the tips included. With some merchants this could take over a week, but WaMu showed it as incomplete until the merchant said, okay, I’m done.

Chase shows them as finalized, then goes back to adjust the amount when the tip comes through. Which, okay, who thought that was a good idea? You can’t monkey with transaction balances after they’ve been posted!!! What kind of audit trail is that? You fail bookkeeping forever! Good bye.

Warning: pictures of my lop sided face with attempts at facial hair behind this link.
Continue reading Nice try, dick target

Cherries!, originally uploaded by JW Doom.

Who needs ice, bitch!

I’m putting in an under the wire treadmilling. Gotta try out my new Nike cross trainers my homie Jon Squares set me up with. Quality assist, dude.

I don’t think I’m gonna make sure I’m out the door by closing time. The front desk girl is unfriendly as hell. Maybe she thinks she’s hotter than she is, maybe she thinks I’m creepy. Can’t be bothered to care.

If the Kindle iPhone app is still free you should absolutely get it. If it’s south of $5 you should consider it. It’s pretty easy to read on the screen (I find). Only drawback is there’s no way to see how far in the book you are. That I can see.

My reread (iPhone thought I was trying to type Therese. WTF?) of Perdido Street Station is, going. The plot could be developing faster, but I think I’m supposed to be considering the city a character. I ain’t.

The View From The Bridge by Nicholas Meyer is pretty sweet. I got it yesterday and I’m almost done. A must for any Trek fan, especially if you’re more Deep Space Nine than Next Generation. I never bought into Roddenberry’s utopian idea, anyway.

I finally figured out how to get past the sticking point on my current first draft. Good thing three certain people aren’t blowing me up with feedback on my revising project, huh. (hint)

Multiple early stage projects vying for attention. Not sure what to do with any of them. Poop.

To my mind the greatest obstacle to ensuring every American kid gets a quality education is teacher’s unions. Admittedly, that link leads to an extreme example, but the underlying problem is everywhere.

You may say that political conservatives, who generally loathe public education because of its ability to level society, are a bigger threat. I do agree that conservatives hate public education and that’s a big reason why. However, most of the population can’t afford private schools, whether elite, parochial or whatever. It’s these middle and lower class folks who ultimately decide the fate of public education with their votes, and they’d be less likely to support cuts in public education funding if the product was worthwhile (religious extremists who hate secular education excepted, of course). And, with apologies to my friends who are or are becoming teachers, it ain’t. Oh, no, it’s really not.

I’ve hit this topic up twice now (here and here, it’s a bugaboo of mine because I do believe in the importance of public education. Were it up to me, I’d ban private education. Equal opportunity will never be realized until every kid in America has a chance to compete equally, starting with a quality education in a public school. But the rich will never buy into this as long as they have the option to give their spoiled brats a leg up. Of course an outright ban on private education wouldn’t work, so it would work thusly, you can pay for your kid to go to private or religious school, but they must attend public school full time (this would also help the kids victimized by their holy text banging cuckoo parents).

It’s a reach, I admit, but the first step is getting poor parents to not wish they could afford private education for their kids, because public schools suck. And why do public schools suck? Because you can’t fire a damn teacher! Nothing works without accountability and teacher’s unions prevent accountability from ruining a bureaucrat’s cushy summer-off gig. If teachers are all good (no one realistically thinks that all examples of any profession can be great), the poor will buy in (please note, by “poor” I don’t mean “black”, I grew up in a poor white neighborhood and my schools were crap, too). It slowly but surely creeps into the kind of petite bourgeoisie whose kids populate parochial schools (of course, not the people who demand religious education, but fuck them). Then you have a grass roots political movement that fucks the wealthy and powerful. Everybody wins.

But no one buys into a system that doesn’t work, and the public school system doesn’t work. Why doesn’t it work? Teacher pay is often presented as a problem, but that’s bullshit. Everybody knows public teachers generally work for peanuts, but that doesn’t make for a lack of new candidates. I personally wouldn’t be a teacher for any amount of money. You’ve got the kids, then the God damned parents, then the principals and I have no idea what the point of THAT job is. Still, there are plenty of people who WANT to teach for some odd reason. (for the record, I support raises and I doubt merit pay is workable, just fire the bad ones)

So why doesn’t it work? What IS the answer? Well, bad teachers. This is unfortunately a case where one bad apple does ruin the whole bunch. I couldn’t identify most of the teachers I had in a line up if they’d mugged me. But I can remember with astonishing clarity my 5th grade elementary and my 6th grade home room teacher. Because they were terrible fucking people. My 4th grade teacher was no great shakes either. They were the teachers that Pink Floyd sang about. I know my parents would remember my 5th grade teacher because they had repeated meetings with classmates’ parents and school officials about his tendency to threaten his students regularly and abuse them occasionally. If a parent slams a 5th grader into a brick wall, they go to jail, if a teacher does it, their union goes to bat. (Eyewitness blogger here, the kid’s initials were ZG.)

And that is the biggest threat to ensuring every kid in America gets a quality education.

Next week is the last of my three driving lessons and accordingly my final chance to get some professional instruction. Without spending even more money, anyway.

The only things I can think of I need to cover are crazy streets like 82nd, freeway driving and some parking stuff. Parallel parking in particular.

The suggestions I’d like are what do YOU all wish that you could do, or do better when driving. Or perhaps what do you wish other people knew?

I already know how to not tailgate, not that it’s a specific skill. That’s more “how not to be an asshole.”

The bus is only going to go as fast as it’s going to go. The repeated stops are not only the point of a bus, but factored into the schedule. Getting irritated at the constant stream of befuddled folks taking perhaps a full minute to board doesn’t help. Worry only raises the blood pressure. Breathe deeply, unless there’s B.O. or someone brought french fries aboard. Relax. Be still. Don’t kill anyone.

I’ll get there when I get there.
Especially with all these fucking traffic lights.

Actually bought some groceries today. First thing! Milk, salad mix & red beans. Yeah, I may be temporarily poor. I ate prepared food in my kitchen (twice?) and tracked the calories. Back on track on Project Stop Being Such A Fat Bastard, yay! I ran my daily futility routine. Productivity abounds! I even finished entering lyrics and album art on my current main playlist, which I promptly reset.

Awesome. I thought. Now writing, then I walk to the gym with my pedometer. Then tonight Krav Maga! I am back in business after last week’s utter irresponsibility!

Or, I could lose four fucking hours to the world wide timesuck.

Shit.

I’m missing Krav because PFC Teabag is home from Iraq. Everything else is just me riding the failwhale like a sandworm.

Still, I’m glad I got the playlist reset. Net positive.