My daughter is spending a school year at a school in Florence Italy. She did a ton of work preparing to live outside the country and yesterday she spent the entire day on the phone with CIBC instead of exploring her new city. You see, she and her 3 roommates all agreed to put their rent money in a single account and they went to CIBC and explained what they needed - the property management company can only take a credit card from North America, debit cards don’t work with their system. They could open an Italian account BUT they need an Italian social insurance number to do that and that would require 2 months and several visits to government offices to achieve. So CIBC set them up with a joint account and a VISA debit card for each of them so any one of the 4 could pay their rent. They also explained the limit they would need in order to make their monthly payment.
So, they arrive in Italy, go to pay their rent and it rejects due to limit. One call with the bank straightens that out with a 24 hr delay. They go back to the office to try again and it fails with a new error message. They try on the webpage and that doesn’t work. They call me and I try on the North American page and that doesn’t work. They call the bank and the first 4 people swear she’s doing something wrong that of course it works and they’re not seeing rejected transactions. The 5th person finally tells her the truth - European payment systems see Visa debit cards as debit, not Visa and this will not work and never would work.
Luckily I have a never used credit card that will handle her monthly rent so she is setting up a bill payment from their joint account to my credit card and they’re going to pay their rent with my card and then when the conversion and fees show up on the account they’ll pay that amount but good god. If they just gave her accurate information in the first place it would have been a lot easier to work this out in advance.
This is our last straw with CIBC. Between the hassle when we sold our house, an RRSP that I’ve requested they move 6 months ago that’s still sitting in a basically no interest holding account and this little completely wrong information situation I’m bank shopping. Fuckers I hate bank shopping.
I’m wondering where did she get the information about needing an Italian SSN. What I’d heard from people who’d spent a few months there (but not working there, so no SSN) and what I find on a google is that you can access different types of accounts depending on whether you’re a resident or not and you have higher fees if you’re not, but not on SSN being an absolute requirement. Some banks (including Bancoposta, the Post Office) only open accounts to residents, but that “some” is key.
I had a really great interview last week and they said I would hear back from them about a second interview by today and it’s already 2.5 hours into today and I still haven’t heard from them and I’m pretty sure that means that they aren’t going to be calling with good news and I’m really anxious because I really want this job and the more money it will earn me because I’ve amassed quite a lot of debt over the year what with the little boy being born, my cars both needing tune ups and new tires and the city making me replace my sidewalk and such forth so it would be really awesome if this damn job would just call me back.
Little Bird, I know the feeling of waiting… waiting… waiting… It sucks. You’ve got my sympathy, and I hope you DO hear something today.
Now for my rant.
Driver who backed(?) into my motorcycle: Fuck you. You didn’t do much damage, but you did break the stem that connects the right rear turn signal to the bike. The replacement is inexpensive and easy to find, but if you’d been paying just a little bit of attention, I wouldn’t need to replace it at all.
Honda engineer who designed the wiring on the 1985 Honda Rebel 250: Fuck you and the rest of your team of drunken lemurs with a rusty pineapple. What the hell were you on, that putting the wiring in a box under the fender, secured by three bolts that are only visible if you’re a mouse standing on the rear tire (when they’re not covered with road schmutz), seemed like a good idea? Oh, and that non-movable, inflexible rubber “boot” that surrounds the junction box and hides all the connections - that sucks too.
While I’m hating my motorcycles, I’d like to give a shout-out to the designers of the 1992 Kawasaki Vulcan. Great job, folks, putting the spark plugs in wells that are both deep and narrow, unreachable by any normal readily available spark plug socket. And you did a great job of making the socket deep, but not deep enough to accommodate my specially-ordered thin-walled socket without removing or damaging a couple of hoses. Excellent maximizing of inaccessibility and inconvenience!
Wait - what? Maybe I’m not getting a clear picture of your relationship with this other child, but while I appreciate you are genuinely looking out for her welfare, unless you are her parent/caretaker, you do not have the authority to make her wear a helmet. She can blithely ignore your instructions all she wants and I would expect a mini-rant from the girl’s parents about some crazy neighbor lady thinking she can order their daughter around.
You can prevent her from playing with your daughter, however, if you feel that not wearing a helmet is bad enough behavior to warrant it.
One of the neighbor’s kids was in violation of the law. She was alternatively riding her bike and her scooter without her helmet. This is against the law in our state and endangers her life. She was right in front of my house. Like any normal, concerned parent I yelped at her to put the helmet back on her head.
She ignored me. A few minutes later, I called her mom. Her mom is a friend of mine and thanked me for telling her about her daughter’s wreckless behavior. My own eldest child pulled the same stunt last year. Another mother down the block told me that my daughter was on her scooter without her helmet. I had a talk with Eldest. She admitted to the behavior and I took away her scooter for a week. I thanked the neighbor profusely for making sure my daughter didn’t wind up with her brains on the sidewalk.
I have no idea why you’re offended that I care about the welfare of all children but that’s your nuttery not mine. I would definitely want to know if my kid was on a bike or scooter without her helmet. Any neighbor is more than welcome to reprimand my kid to put it on and damned well welcome to let me know if she doesn’t. FYI, one of the other neighborhood mothers told me she has chided that little girl about using her helmet several times in the past year.
Are we all supposed to ignore common sense safety rule and let neighborhood kids get hurt?
Context is awesome. There’s a big difference between yelling at your friend’s kid when said friend isn’t around, versus yelling at a random neighbor kid.
Dear Facebook friends: no, not all of you, just the partisan Republicans who take great delight in posting anti-Obama memes that describe him as anti-America, troop-hating, etc. Fuck you. :rolleyes:
I have to hold my tongue on FB as I’d like to not lose anyone over this, but it boggles my mind that so many decent, intelligent people can fall prey to the hate-mongering coming from the right. Do you really believe that shit in your hearts? Do you? Most of it is not clever or even true, it’s just pathetic and it saddens me that you believe it.
Yes, I know the left does it too, but it seems so much more prevalent and over the top when it comes from the right.
Agreed. People with “nanny” qualifications, or 12 year olds are the only ones who apply. right now I am sucking up my husband being more or less self employed, hoping something will change soon.
The Royal Bank pisses me off more than most of the other banks. I had a long ridiculous episode with them in the mid nineties about transferring and closing accounts in BC and Ontario. (Best quote from that was "you have to go to your own bank, in person to close it, then we can open one for your here. Except I was in Thunder Bay, and my branch which I had never wanted to transfer to, was in Vancouver.) Which was too bad because I had my original account with them opened September 9th 1969, age 1 day.
And I have pretty much been a TD customer ever since.
Yeah, you start yelling at random neighbourhood kids and before you know it, you’re branded a Curmudgeon.
The Queen of the World award today goes to the lady in the parking lot with me - we both pulled into either side of nose-to-nose parking spots at the same time, and apparently she wanted me to back out so she could pull through. Not going to happen, lady. My car is nice and small, so even though she was a foot and a half into my spot, I was still able to turn my car off and get out, with my car all in the space.
I thought my post made it very clear that I knew the kid in question quite well. But I am definitely working on Cumudgeon in Training status if not actually full blown Curmudgeonhood quite yet.
Why the fuck does the phone even have a rotary setting? And how the fuck did the baby grab the phone and find it? What the fucking hell are you thinking Panasonic? Are there really morons out there yearning for this shit? What’s next? Is there some setting that will turn this phone back into a corded model?
It did not, at least to me, hence my starting off my post with “Wait - what? Maybe I’m not getting a clear picture of your relationship with this other child…”
There is, it seems, a small but stubborn subset of households that still have rotary phone service. No, I don’t know why the phone companies still support rotary dial.
