We call 'em “central coast gnats”, as they seem thicker here than anywhere.
My rant: I really hate the trend of supermarkets deciding for me how much produce I’m going to buy. More and more vegetable and fruits are sold prepackaged in plastic coffins or little plastic “tote bags”. I don’t want a whole pound of cherry tomatoes or mini-cucumbers or two pounds of grapes! It’s especially bad at Asian supermarkets, where you can only buy baby bok choi or Thai chilis in mass quantities. Who could use a whole pound of Thai chilis? One or two of those babies is enough to spice up a very large stir-fry.
Sometimes I can’t believe how out of touch I am with this “modern world”. One of my hesitations in getting a new cell phone and new plan is that there’s a substantial discount in a plan that has direct bank payments rather than credit card payments. Or, IOW, they charge a big premium for anything other than direct bank transfer.
I was under the impression that “bank payments” meant authorized withdrawals from your account. The only entity that’s authorized to do that is my home and auto insurance company, and I refuse to give it to anyone else.
This impression is wrong, and I thank @LSLGuy and perhaps others for enlightening me. In the “bill payments” menu, my bank has an obvious selection for “set up regular payments” (obvious to anyone but me, that is!) where you can set up payments to any billable entity on any schedule you want. A “bank push” method rather than “payee pull” method.
I’m still leaving my insurance on the “pull” method because the amounts may vary, and you don’t want to piss off your insurance company when you may need them most!
My phone bill varies slightly, usually only be pennies but it’s not always the same. That’s the case for many of my bills. Just make sure to check frequently if you’re taking this route, or you might find yourself under/overpaying.
You will probably find the discount only applies if they pull money from your bank. Not if you push money from your bank to them. Even if you have that set up to go every month automatically. Bastards!
Separate issue:
For the slighly varying recurring charges, I just set my auto-pay to a bit more than the variation. E.g. if the bill varies between 90 & 100, just send $105 every month. 6 months later you’re about one bill ahead. So pause that one payment.
My philosophy is that if I can’t trust a business that I am fostering a relationship with to withdraw money per a previously agreed-upom billing rate, I won’t do business with them.
It’s not like they’re going to arbitrarily grab more money than they should, and if there’s a dispute with my bill I’m going to have that dispute regardless of whether they’re doing automatic withdrawals or not.
I’ve done business that way for more than 20 years without a problem. There’s a reason that the world works that way now. It’s a vast improvement over them sending you a bill and you paying it. And a monthly scheduled payment often doesn’t really work.
To me, it’s not a matter of trusting their ethics. As you say, if I question that, why am I transacting w them at all?
It’s more a matter of trusting their IT systems to be glitch-free. If they want to withdraw $200.00 but instead withdraw $20,000, we both have a problem, but they hold all the cards and I have all the downsides. I’d rather the balance of risks go the other way.
That’s an argument against using any sort of electronic payment method.
And nothing is glitch-free, but that’s not a glitch. That’s a scandal. It’s not going to happen. You might as well swear off banks and keep cash under a mattress, because banks aren’t glitch-free either.
There’s a difference between caution and paranoia, and that philosophy is tipping far away from the “caution” end.
You can choose to live that way. There’s no law against it. It’s not unethical either. There’s nothing wrong with it except the extreme and unnecessary inconvenience you’re causing for yourself. But people certainly have weirder and more self-destructive quirks than that so it’s no big deal.
I appreciate the advice from youse guys on the relatively minor banking issue, but you need to appreciate the import of the above. To put it a different way, two very strong-willed women are descending upon me on Monday, hell-bent on telling me how to live my life for my own good. If I wish to Rot in Place (RIP – a very appropriate acronym) the aforementioned strong-willed women will not allow me to do so. The newly enlisted real estate agent and the ex are apparently friends – a powerhouse synergy previously unknown to me – so they constitute a combined force of such awesome power that no defense has ever been invented by man.
The most likely error (still not very likely) is that they pull a payment multiple times (and twice is the likely number there). My wife worked IT for an insurance company back in the 1980s that did that - what a mess.
So then the question is if the linked account can survive that without overdrawing for either that payment or others pulling from the same source. You’ll eventually get your money back (either as a deposit or skipped future payment) and hopefully made whole for any fees.
My husband asked me to tidy up an area I failed to tidy up last week, and I’m just sitting here feeling daunted by the smallest little task. I have to return the towels that didn’t match our shower curtain, and now clean up this thing, and he asked me to start pulling up the roots of whatever is growing out of our flower bed (I’m just planning to remove everything that was planted by previous owners and start over.) Then I think about going into the office tomorrow and want to scream.
These aren’t Herculean tasks. I’m just so fucking burned out they feel like it.
I took three days off last week. I have tried to relax and I’ve found it very difficult. When I try to do stuff with my hands (stitching etc) I just ruminate, but screen time is no good either. Last night I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about the jumpers on 9/11. My thoughts always take a dark turn after 11pm.
I just had the idea that the fatigue is due to a med switch. I requested to go off Vyvanse and switch to Adderall. The doc said it was a 1:1 substitution so she had me abruptly stop Vyvanse and start taking the Adderall instead. I’ve been taking Adderall for three days now and no Vyvanse. Since the whole reason I went off Vyvanse was to avoid the withdrawal symptoms that come with medication disruption, maybe right now I’m in Vyvanse withdrawal. So maybe I’m just going to lie down. And may this be my last ever Vyvanse withdrawal.
@Spice_Weasel that’s a whole lotta “other people telling you what to do” in various flavors, without much of your own agency in determining what you do with your time & energy.
I have a long history of significant withdrawal symptoms whenever I can’t take my morning Vyvanse (usually because the pharmacy is out of stock.) I become very fatigued to the point that I cannot function.
I’ve also been taking Adderall in the afternoons and noticed when I skip my Adderall I don’t have any withdrawal symptoms. Adderall also works great.
So I thought hey, I might as well switch from Vyvanse in the AM to Adderall so that when my medication is out of stock, at least I won’t have withdrawal symptoms.
So I’m now taking Adderall in the AM and PM.
I was just figuring that I’m having the usual withdrawal from Vyvanse symptoms. Not as bad as usual because the Adderall helps. But I might just be a little fatigued for a while.
That’s a good point. And I had a major social engagement obligation yesterday. Lots of demands on me right now. I told my husband not to expect much from me today. He seems understanding. I think it’s necessary to avoid really going into full-blown burnout.
I was going to return some stuff I bought, literally the last day I can return it, but I can’t find the receipt and it may be more trouble than it’s worth right now. I can just send some brand new towels and bath mats off to Goodwill. Or donate them to my agency’s shelter.
We call this the ADHD tax. The sheer monetary cost of having poor executive function. My past is littered with unreturned retail items.
Wrong! There are enough horror stories out there of someone traveling & racking up hundreds or even a couple thousand dollar bill because of roaming charges. If they suck their funds out first, you can’t pay the rent/mortgage, or other bills because they took your funds which they think are theirs.
When they replaced my gas meter, they got it wrong & I therefore had a wrong-but-very-large bill; took months to finally get them to fix it because theyd adjust the bill but not come out & reset the meter so the next month was wrong, too. I’m sure if they were debiting my account they would have gotten away with it at some point
My rant - i train in a glass-walled building. I wanted to do some hair of the dragon & get back out there yesterday; however there was some battle-of-the-bands / all day concert right at the base. I just wasn't up for 150-200 people watching me.
That’s not “wrong”; you brought up a completely irrelevant counter-example of someone fucking themselves over because they were stupid. That has nothing to do with a company taking tens of thousands of dollars from a “glitch”.
Okay here’s what happened. We got a new house, new bathroom, I am in the spirit of decorating our new home. A month ago I bought new towels, I brought them home, Spouse Weasel didn’t think they matched. I ordered different towels online, saying, “These new ones I just ordered will probably work, but let’s hang on to these less desirable ones just in case until we see the product.” My husband agreed we could go with the original ones if these new ones didn’t work because at this point we are sick of bathroom stuff (don’t even get me started on the shower curtain.)
Well there have been a number of shipping delays for the ones I ordered. So 30 days have passed and I still don’t have matching towels.
And yes, it’s stupid, but I want my stuff to match.
I’m just going to hide away the other stuff until we get the new towels, then I’ll donate the original ones.
