Just got off the phone with a friend of mine. This is his story.
He travels a LOT and wines and dines customers as part of his job. His company reimburses him, of course, but it’s nothing for a thousand dollars to be ‘off’ when he does his bills. He had an unusually busy two months the last couple of months. He noticed recently that his bank account was empty. This was odd to say the least. He had a good nest egg in there, so he does a deep inventory of his account.
He helped out a woman and her kids about a year and a half ago. Let them live with him for 5 months or so (was only supposed to be 2), to let her get her feet under her again. She had managed to bankrupt herself. She had moved out a long time ago and he has since decided that as much as he wanted to help those kids out he just couldn’t let her stay in his house any more. She didn’t seem to be using this opportunity to save.
The missing money from his account was from the checks she stole and then used. She forged his name on the checks. When he discovered this he reported it. He didn’t want the woman to go to jail but she had stolen around 4 thousand dollars. So he did what he had to do. He reported the stolen checks to the bank and the police.
Turns out he needn’t have bothered telling Regions. They told him they’d take care of it and he’d get his money back within two weeks. Two weeks later he’s checking to see why his money hasn’t been returned. Turns out one of the four checks she wrote was over 30 days old so Regions decided they didn’t need to do anything about that one….OR THE ONES THAT WERE LESS THAN 30 DAYS OLD! They’ve basically told him to fuck off. They aren’t getting his money back. Apparently if she could steal a couple more checks she could just keep writing bad checks as far as Regions is concerned.
If this is the way that Regions is going to do business then I choose to no longer do business with them. I would recommend that unless you feel some real NEED to do business with Regions that perhaps you should choose another bank. One that might actually try to recover money stolen from your account.
So I update my computer this morning, reboot it and get back to work. Today around 3:00 the auto-update tells me there is another update so I update. HOWEVER, this time I want to continue working and I’ll just worry about rebooting at the end of the day. Too bad Microsoft didn’t see it that way. I’m sure it’s on a timer but it feels like randomly after the update the machine pops up the ‘Do you want to reboot?’ dialog. Seeings as how I told it NO earlier and that I’m still working on something the answer will remain NO for the rest of the day.
Well that reboot dialog is a tricky one and manages to pop up RIGHT at the spot I’m working. Reboot button gets touched and now one by one all my open apps are being forced to end. THANKS MICROSOFT! And FUCK YOU too!
And no I didn’t lose anything this time. Everything was saved. I’ve learned from last time. I’ll never figure out what e-mail I had open but I’ll survive that. Simply being forced to take a time out when I was working is annoying as hell though.
Had one of ‘those’ days today. Been working in a Microsoft Access database for work. I’m having to write some VBA scripts to import some data into the Access database so it can then produce some XML for me. Anyway, I was ALMOST done today around 2 when my latest test of the script caused the DB to infinitely loop and CTL-BREAK did NOT stop it. So, I had to stop the entire DB and re-load it, no big deal right? Well here is where I piss myself off. I hadn’t saved that script I was working on at all and when the DB came back it was gone, never to return. So just like that, a day and a half of code <POOF> gone in a puff of idiocy of my own making.
I almost wanted to cry. <sigh> Save early and often.
PS: I hate MS Access.
As a MS State grad and therefor a member of the SEC family of schools I see an upside to whoever wins this game. If Texas wins then its gonna be ‘THANK GOD we don’t have to listen to all those Alabama fans brag for the next hundred years.” If Alabama wins we’ll have to deal with the bragging but at least I’ll be able to say ‘SEC! SEC! SEC! #1 whoo!’ or something along those lines.
Such is the life of a MS State fan. (PS whole family is Ole Miss so I actually like it when they do well, except against MS State.)
Well 2010 is here and so am I. December was a bit rough with a lot of travel to visit family (both mine and Nikki’s). Nikki has now met both sides of my family and still isn’t running for the hills, so I think the wedding is a ‘go’.
Getting back into the swing of things at work is hard. I have like 6 projects that need to be finished NOW but aren’t anywhere near that. One of those projects is really slowing down my production, Gentoo updates. I.do.NOT.know.linux. I have to update some Gentoo servers at work and the portage system has an error that I have no idea how to fix. Once our resident wunderkind was no longer resident things immediately fell apart [Good luck to you anyway, Chris]. I don’t think I’m ever gonna get back to wunderkind status myself. Not at this rate.
I’m thinking that I may just sleep late tomorrow because the weather is COLD and gonna be all sorts of nasty tonight and tomorrow morning. Sticking my head under the sheets and hoping it all goes away is a viable plan, right?
As long as the power doesn’t go out I guess life is good. Here’s to hoping that 2010 is better than 2009!
See this news article: WAPT
Some things that jumped out at me:
Jackson Public Schools have 4,500 employees, but only 2,200 of those are teachers. The rest are administrators or support staff.
Rankin County Schools have 3,000 employees and 1,600 are teachers.
• Rankin County Schools pays 1.95 percent of its budget to administrators.
• Madison County Schools pays 2.03 percent of its budget to administrators.
• JPS pays 2.92 percent of its budget to administrators.
If 2-3 percent of a schools budget goes to administrators where does the rest of the budget go? Is most of a budget going toward something other than people’s paychecks? The article makes it seem as though more is being payed to administrators than teachers but if that is the case then only 5-6 percent of a schools budget is going towards both teachers AND administrators.
Are the news guys playing a statistics trick? They make it look like 50-55% of a schools employees are administrators but they stuck the ’support staff’ in there and it could be THAT is where a lot of the actual number of people comes from and therefor administrators are actually a small percent but it’s unclear in the report.
Overall I find this article typical of what passes for ‘news’ these days, and I don’t feel they actually told me anything. They threw some numbers against the wall and hoped some of them would stick. I certainly don’t feel I’ve been thoroughly informed enough to make an informed opinion on anything.
Does anyone else feel differently about this?
The Daily show lets us all know what “Fox News” is: Hilarity Ensues
I keep saying this, “I gotta watch ‘The Daily Show’ more often.”, but I keep missing the best ones.
I’m happy that a sitting president received a Nobel Peace Prize. This is a good thing, or should be. Presidents being active enough spreading peace in the world, to received such a prize while still in office is actually AWESOME. However; President Obama hasn’t done enough yet in my opinion to have earned such an award.
The President is currently running two foreign wars, a state run gulag (where we have acknowledged torturing prisoners) and has only been on the job for around nine months so far. What has he done to deserve a peace prize, other than state(no real action that I know of yet) there should be more equality between Palestine and Israel when settling(PUN! Oh I’m good!) their differences, and that nuclear non-proliferation is a good thing?
Perhaps the last eight years have so rattled the Nobel committee that hearing a more rational rhetoric coming from the leader of the most powerful country on earth has given them leave of their sense of proportion and affected their decision? Perhaps they are being all liberal/socialist tricky, and hoping the award will entice the President to do things more along the lines of a Nobel Peace award winner? Either way I hope the President does eventually do works that will be deserving of a Peace Prize; but he hasn’t done it yet.
I agree with Paul Volcker that the current policies being put forward by the Obama administration and the Senate Banking Committee will allow ‘to big to fail’ to continue, and I agree with Volcker that this is a bad thing. I disagree with Volcker about the decision to save AIG and GM. I think we pretty much had to do those things, but I would like to not have to do such things again in the future. I do NOT want a safety net for our financial system as being proposed. Hell I disagree with Volcker about only having a safety net for commercial banks.
What I want is a federal system in place, like FDIC, that can swoop in and dismantle even the largest of banks while maintaining a minimum customer account. Customers do not lose out when a smaller bank goes bankrupt because the FDIC guarantees bank deposits. The owners or stockholders DO lose out which is as it should be, their investment vehicle failed. This should be the case for all financial institutions. The reason we had to use tax payer’s money to save AIG, and the ‘big banks’ was because letting them die would have completely crushed the US/world economy. Hell, even saving them the way we did, still caused many corporations to fold because they were to close to the brink to start with.
If the government isn’t willing to create such a organization, like FDIC, for ALL banks, including the biggest, then create regulation that won’t allow ANY financial institution to handle more than say 5% of all transactions in this country. Otherwise, we’re just in the ‘pre’ phase of another bailout.
Well water on the moon was news to me. It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out. I had always thought, as the link said, that there was no way water was on the moon because of the composition of the moon rocks brought back by Apollo. Nice to see science self correcting and questioning long held assumptions.