found_drama

Forget thieves and blackhats out there pilfering your SSNs, credit card numbers, and all that. Put your fear in the very same institutions that legitimately ask for, need, and SSL your info.

A couple years ago I’d had a problem with a particular bank. We’d signed up through MS Money to auto-sync the account details. This seemed to go fine for a month. And the second month. But after the third or fourth things seemed out-of-whack. Because somewhere during month #2, it had entered a deposit twice. (A paycheck isn’t something to have in there twice. Gives you the wrong idea, doesn’t it?) Things turned out OK in the end but potentially scary, no?

More recently, I created an account with my student loan vendor, mostly so that I could keep track of the balance etc. (Since we’d lost some of the payment history when the Quicken file got trashed in an epic hard drive failure…) Anyway, we created our account and after confirming the this and the that to get in, we were greeted with a prompt to “Set up online payments?” Our options? Set up automatic debits. (No thanks.) Pay online. (Er… No thanks…) Or “Do not enroll at this time.” We opted not to enroll. However, for some reason, the system elected to interpret “change nothing” as “enroll us for electronic payments and stop sending us our regular statements/payment reminders.” Getting that corrected was a phone call away but the customer service rep’s assertion that we should be getting reminders emailed to us was a little patronizing.

Don’t try this at home, folks.

currently playing: KMFDM “Megalomaniac”

A & I are living in a somewhat-larger-than-we-need house but are renting out half of it to a couple of other folks. We would probably not have engaged in this arrangement if not for the dire necessity of it but it seems to be working out OK because they’re hardly ever around. A is hardly ever around much these days for that matter either. On this particular day I’ve returned home and am getting some laundry together. Multi-tasking my way through that chore and a few others, I start piling up the laundry into a basket on top of the washing machine. In the process, I manage to get naked (the clothes I was wearing must have needed washing as well) and I consider starting up the shower while I’m at it. Right about then I hear someone come in (the housemates!) and dash back to my room (which happens to be the same small room I had at my parents’ house in high school). The problem here is that the door to that room doesn’t shut very well. Somehow I lose a bit of time during all this because I keep scrambling around the room trying to find shorts (or pants or anything) to cover myself while continuously slapping at the door to try and keep it closed. I manage to fall a few times and by the fourth or fifth time a woman just throws the door open and tells me to grow up. She’s naked as well and struts right on in, having a seat on my bed. I’m making every effort to turn or else cover myself. By now I’ve found a pair of blue nylon shorts but I can only seem to get my left leg into it. She’s shaking her head at me, embarrassed that I’m going to these lengths. She’s moon-faced and petite and dangerously curvy. She helps me get my other leg into the shorts (for my sake, apparently). I ask why she’s naked and she explains that there was just a sewage back-up into the house (again!? in five minutes time!?) and could she borrow any of my clothes?