indiboi.com

I called the Jo-Ann store that I originally bought the needles from. They were unable/unwilling to help unless I’d come in. I asked about going into the local store and was told they’d be able to help me. Okay, fine.

So, the first thing the woman at the local stores says is ‘why should we fix their problem?’ ….gah!

Then she was all ‘well, let’s see if it’s really on sale.’ …gah, again, as I followed her to the back of the store.

Finally she did a return and then I repurchased them at the corrected price. I should point out that the needles didn’t ring up for the correct price at that store either. The whole procedure was ridiculous.

The cashier’s bad attitude negated my buying the rest of the needles I was interested in. I was so disgusted when I left that I doubt I’ll go back. I thought about just buying them online, then I discovered that the free shipping coupon had expired. So, screw it, I’m done with you Jo-Ann! I’ll just buy what I need with 40-50% off coupons at Michaels, or AC Moore!

I bought two knitting needles tonight at the Jo-Ann’s in Hagerstown. I didn’t really look at the prices, seeing as they were allegedly on sale for 25% off and I was going to get them regardless of the regular price.

Unfortunately one of them didn’t ring up at the sale price and I didn’t notice it until I was already at home, points against me for not paying enough attention. In my defense I was headachy and hungry at the time.

The difference in price isn’t that great, only $2.25. It’s not enough to go back to the store, gas would cost more than that. The thing is, though, if I didn’t want to save the money then I’d not have waited until they were on sale.

I hate this position, where I’m going to be frustrated by a mistake that will cost more to fix than to just live with.

I checked all three of my credit reports using annualcreditreport.com, all three are clean as a whistle; nothing negative and my reported utilization is still at basically half. The fuckers at the issuing bank must just be getting in their jabs before they’re not allowed to anymore without showing justification, or afraid of what I’ll do since I have slightly more available credit than before. It’s disgusting how you’re screwed whether you use the credit or not.

Oh well, I’ll get this paid off as quickly as I can, don’t really have any other options at this point. I haven’t called them yet, but the final result after being on hold and talking to someone who has barely any grasp of English isn’t likely to be positive anyway. I won’t continue reward sleazy behavior with money paid via interest on additional debt and as such I’ll definitely never use the card again.

Now I just need to pray that my only other balance carrying card can also be paid down before they decide to put me at what is essentially default, too, just for the lulz. I keep a relatively large balance in relationship to my credit line on that card because the interest rate is attractive. I guess that’s the game, they lure you with low rates, and then at random double or triple it just because now that you’ve used the credit they’ve given you they’re now afraid you won’t pay it back. It’s very worrisome as apparently this particular bank has randomly pushed millions of their customers off their nice and low fixed rates (like mine) into the 20+ range, again, just for the lulz. To make matters potentially worse, because of that nice interest rate I have not maintained the sort of credit line cushion on that account, unlike all of my others, though it doesn’t appear to have helped much for the account currently giving me grief with the new 25%!

I thought I was being “responsible” with my credit!

As a “valued customer” my APR on a credit card I carry a balance on has skyrocketed from sucky 17.7% to a ludicrous 24.7%.  That’s a 39.5% increase!  That used to be what we’d consider default! Yeah, I feel really fucking valued right now. Oh, and the kick in the nuts is that even if I closed the account to reject the new terms, the new APR will go into effect anyway because the balance isn’t zero. I really love how these new “protect the consumer” regulations the government is putting into effect next year have pushed the banks to really hammer the current customers. Way to go! It looks like I’ll be pulling money out of my reserve fund to pay off as much of that balance as possible as quickly as possible. It’s so jacked up that they only give eleven days notice!

They must not like that I got another card and didn’t close the old one, back when I had that stolen account number snafu with my everyday card and they took more than a week to “expedite” me a replacement. I decided to just leave the old one open for “emergencies” and haven’t used it in the last four months. This is such bullshit, but whatever, I can expect it to happen on all of my cards now, issuing banks act like dominoes. I hate how when you presumably do everything right you’re still fucked, never late, paid more than the minimum and generally by a very significant margin, never over the limit, nowhere near “maxed out” in any fashion. Now I don’t know if I should close it immediately, even though I’ll still be screwed by the higher interest, or if I should still rapidly pay it down, but keep it open. Leaving the account open would seem to reward them for their evil ways, but the credit voodoo may punish me if I close it. It would seem my increased available credit, even though my debt did not increase, caused this to happen. I was under the impression that a low utilization of credit was a good thing, guess not. That is, of course, unless my “identity” has been “stolen” by someone, which is extremely doubtful. I apparently have to write letters to the bank and credit bureaus in order to get explanations. You’d think they’d give at least some nebulous reason in their “we think you suck and are going to make you pay for it” type notices. Funny thing, just a couple months ago they actually increased my credit line.

Argh, I’m so angry, in that trembling about ready to strike sort of way. Especially so because they’re not only jacking the rate hard, but at the same time trying to sell their moronic credit protection service to gouge me out of even more money!

I bet the assholes at the issuing bank won’t even let me close it over the phone… It’ll be just one more way they can treat me as a “valued customer.”

Perhaps the answer would be to transfer the remaining balance over to one of my other cards, even with the fee they’ll likely charge, it’ll beat paying almost 25% interest, but unfortunately the accounts that could accept the balance have “no offers available.” I must have contracted the credit equivalent of the plague somehow.

Oh, and this comes after a “notice left” by the lazy son of a bitch mailman, on a package for my niece’s birthday, in which no delivery attempt was even made. There’s no physical notice, so it might just be a stupidity on the part of the USPS as a whole, but in any event I filed an electronic “bring my shit to me you jackasses” request.

Oh, and all that bullshit distracted me from what I was doing at the time and I flooded the bathroom with aquarium water. I was in the middle of a water change on the 75 gallon and needed to fill a bucket with water for when I cleaned a filter later tonight. Silly me, trying to multitask, not expecting near the level of insanity that I encountered when I sat down.

I just realized I never created a Youtube account, turns out that imeridian, indigomeridian, and indiboi are all taken, wtf?! All this came about after reading an article about online identities and how people register others’ names just for fun and profit. There are plenty of services that I don’t particularly want to use now, but may in the future, so I better start registering everywhere, huh? …except for Youtube, fuck that, I want my own damned name, not some bullshit because someone else registered my name first.

I’ve used Linux for a very long time, with Gentoo being my distribution of choice for most of that period. Lately though, it seems that any update breaks so many applications unexpectedly. I just switched to xorg 1.5.x, which went through almost fine, but only because I was paying close attention. Random little things like the volume buttons on the keyboard needed some tweaking, but that only took several hours to figure out (ARGH!!). The new kernel has fucked up ALSA, without a random patch the system won’t even reboot now. Sound was working, then stops completely, and now works again. Quirk, fluke, I have no idea.

Unfortunately I wasn’t paying such close attention to things like bluetooth when I updated the bluez package, and now I can’t for the life of me get the personal area network to work anymore. The whole palm syncing thing is so screwy as to require a network sync over bluetooth, since it won’t work directly. Who knows, maybe it does now, but the eighty billion guides are all out of date, each one says to do something completely different.

Up until the last couple of months my Linux install was very stable, it felt like a real OS, like it should. Unfortunately now it feels like this toy that needs constant fiddling. I don’t want a toy OS, I want a real working OS that will accept updates without breaking half a dozen different things. Even if something breaks, then at least I’d like to be able to find useful help. The bluetooth guide at the bluez site is completely incomprehensible, and everything Gentoo is worthlessly old.

I fear my days of Linux may be coming to an end, maybe I’ll get an iMac, heh. Updating your workstation software shouldn’t have to be a hobby.