Point well taken.
That said, is it true that miniature golf is almost a religion in some parts?
I took my kids when they were toddlers just to play for fun and a lot of people’s smiles slipped.
Last year when I had to have my HVAC system replaced the payments was set up with a credit card company called Synchrony (oddly enough, the same way I paid for my sofa a few years before). I selected an option for a 12-month no-interest loan, as opposed to the 22.6% 84-month plan. It was set up online just like a regular credit card. My monthly statements showed a minimum payment due based on the assumption that I was paying in 84 months, and a monthly interest charge based on that same assumption. However, I made monthly payments so that it would be paid off in 12 months. The statements included a “promotional payoff amount” which showed the amount due in order to pay off the loan without incurring interest; supposedly all the interest I was being charged would be credited to the account if I paid off the loan within the 12 month period.
At the end of June Synchrony switched to a new system where loans like mine would no longer be treated like credit cards. The due date for my payments was the 17th, and I always scheduled my payments for the 15th. However, when I went to the new website to schedule my July payment I found that there was no option to schedule a future payment; payments could only be made that day. Unless I wanted to sign up for automated payments, of course. Also the website not only did not provide full payoff info or, for that matter, any sort of monthly statement like I always got. I complained to customer service and got a generic “sorry about that” and “we’re still working out “some bugs” in the system.
Today I went back and nothing had changed. So I tried their online chat/customer service to try to get a payoff amount, and got both diddley and squat. I was given a customer service number where, after a surprisingly short wait, I was able to get a payoff amount. Now I just need to decide if I just want to pay off the whole thing this month or do it in two payments.
Pay it off NOW. When a finance company takes this direction, things just get worse and worse. Pay it off, and demand a letter confirming that the balance was paid in full, and save it.
Ask me how I know.
The nature of my job was to travel all over the country and chitchat briefly with folks there who worked outdoors. A hefty fraction of people experiencing a hot summer day would long for winter when it’d be cold there. Or least they said they were longing for it. But when I came back 6 months later and they were having a cold gray blowing snow day they’d be longing for summer. Or at least so they said.
Some people surely enjoyed one, but not the other. But “I hate both extremes and love 3 days in April and 2 in October around here; the rest suck!” seemed much more the norm.
That was my thought; I need to make sure I have (or can transfer) enough money into the account I use for these payments. Particularly after the customer service rep I spoke to said something about a possible delay in crediting the interest previously paid.
The new toilet seat arrived this morning (overnight shipping), it was easy and quick to install. Looks good, works well.
That’s my temporary mini-anti-rant.
I had a pretty good mini-rant about banking on 7/31. Today is time for the offsetting anti-rant. All the stupids and constipation have been resolved. I won’t be 100% sure until Monday, but it’s looking good.
Synchrony Bank specializes in captive store credit cards and in consumer signature loans for big ticket items like major uninsured medical or dental expenses, new roofs or HVACs, etc. That’s really all they do. They’re not really a bank in the traditional deposit-taking checking and savings sense.
And most of their loan or card products include some sort of zero APR teaser period coupled to a usurious rate back-dated to the initial transaction date upon default.
I have 3 captive card accounts with them: one electronics store chain, a mattress / bedding store chain, and a housewares store chain. Each has a balance from a year-ish ago when I bought l new everything for my new life.
And I have my bank programmed to pay them each on time so I don’t default.
So far none of my accounts have had any kind of transition away from a card to a closed loan. But thanks for the warning.
Continuing the discussion from Jewel Eye: Staring down the beryl (July Mini-Rants):
I believe every word you said! They’re awful. They’ve convinced me to get off their system as soon as I can arrange it. I’m upgrading my internet service next week and will migrate my phones to VoIP as soon as the ISP equipment upgrades have been accomplished. My CL phone service was restored yesterday afternoon, but no telling for how long I’ll have it so I’m working fast.
New sort-of mini-rant:
I am now pondless. From the day I moved into my place, there was a charming farm pond that provided habitat for fish and game. It has always been a feature of my property, and though I never used it for much, it was pleasant to have.
The other day as I was leaving the property, I glanced over at the pond and there was… no pond. Gone. Empty. The little fishing dock in it is dry and fully exposed, as is the spillover outlet.
I suspect roots from one of the many trees drilled through the dam. Repairing it would be a difficult and expensive undertaking. I guess I now have only a creek. Makes me sad.
My previous “loan” for the sofa purchase was through Ashley Furniture, and as I recall it was also set up as a 12-month-no-interest account. I don’t remember (without digging up my old statements) whether they did the same “charge interest every month and then credit it when I paid off the original amount” for that loan, but if they did it wasn’t as obvious as it was with the HVAC loan. As I’ve been doing with the HVAC loan, I made a point of paying off slightly more than 1/12th the original loan amount every month, then making a final payment for the total balance.
The transition from card to loan was done the last week in June; I received several emails about it over the weeks leading up to it, most of them encouraging me to sign up for automatic payments. I refuse to let any credit card do this; while I always pay my full balance I prefer to control the payments myself, just in case for some reason I need to transfer money before making payments.
Same. My bank pushes the money to my creditors. They don’t pull it from my bank.
That way I hold all the high cards.
The only thing worse than no bacon is bad bacon!
Laying the foundation here for an anticipatory rant this upcoming week.
My Surface tablet (a Pro 7) is getting old; real old. The screen is badly cracked and starting to shed chips. I once dropped it badly enough to bend the metal case (!). And sometimes the screen just goes black-screen, but always recovers with a reboot. These latter failures have been getting more frequent. Oh yeah, and it runs Win10. It could be upgraded to 11, but with the hardware on its last legs that seems like a pointless exercise in vexation I’ve been putting off.
So a couple days ago I took a deep breath and ordered from Amazon a new (refurb actually) Surface Pro 11 with all the goodies. It comes with Win11.
Let the foundational rants begin.
Of course it’s a different physical size than my old one, so my slide-in desktop docking station is now e-waste. And I ought to get an appropriate docking station for the new one = more $. Or maybe just cut my losses and get rid of the real keyboard, mouse, second monitor, and monitor support arm that I used to use daily but now use rarely. Decisions decisions.
The new tablet being slightly bigger also means it probably doesn’t fit neatly into my existing underseat carry-on luggage / briefcase.
Of course the delivery date is sliding day by day and is now next weekend, not today. I’d sorta hoped to deal with this sooner rather than later considering other activities later in the month. Once I start the migration, it’ll be awkward to travel with the job half done. Which tablet(s) do I bring? etc.
I’ve done a bunch of PC migrations and try to keep my installs as vanilla as possible so I’m not spending days doing ultimately useless tweaks in mindless homage to how I arbitrarily decided to do things back in the XP days. So I’m actually expecting that part to be fairly painless.
Hah! Foolish mortal! Where do you get such naïve ideas?
The good news is the old one is still alive, so I can fire it up and compare / contrast the various settings.
At least you had noble intentions.
I pet a cow at the farmers fair last night; I had no bull intentions!
That’s because the bull exploded!
It was a bomb in a bull.
Neighbor dispute is spilling over into my enjoyment of my property. They live five house away from me. They have turned boundary disputes into a multi year nightmare for neighbors on both sides of them. One guy is old retired on fixed income and they are taking him to court to pay for the disposal of his fence that was not on their property and was not their fence. He had a nervous breakdown ended up in hospital. He can barely afford a lawyer to protect himself. Now they’re messing with the other neighbor who will not allow them to push him around and he’s fighting back and winning.
Entitled lying litigating assholes who overpaid for their little ugly split level house have unleashed their spawn on the neighborhood. Normally I’d pay no attention to the kids/teenagers frolicking in the shallows of the vacant waterfront lot next door. Let kids be kids playing pretend and doing no harm. Right? Wrongo Danno.
Not anymore Lucifer and Lucinda, you lost your court case where you lied under oath about Michael and Mary and your restraining order against him was rescinded. Your about to lose your case with the township too because your butch built bleach blonde harpy ran an unpermitted fitness business, music blasting at 7 am, clients parking in road, blocking streets and speeding and harassing neighbors. One of her clients sucker punched Micheal in the face as he was sitting in his truck about to pull into his driveway. Client was defending butch built’s honor or something. He pressed charges, sheriff refused to find probable cause iirc.
One would never suspect the animosity brewing on this street.
Anyway I don’t like their kids the spawns of Lucinda and Lucifer. Whenever they come near my waterfront and I’m already down there. I crank up the jbl speaker mostly to drown out their loud annoying squeaky voices but it also drives them away. We use to let them use our swim raft, not anymore. That was a mistake to allow them access. What was I thinking?
So sorta sis-boom-moo. Even Johnny Carson can’t make that joke fly. It’ll bomb.
If you're baffled
Please explain to me the funniest joke ever told by Johnny Carson
That’s Ok. Sometimes when your neighbors are really shitty, the best thing you can do is just watch a movie.
I have never had the privilege of psychopathic neighbors. If I was Emperor, you’d be entitled to flamethrower them and their house and offspring and animals as you see fit. Sadly, I am not the Emperor. Yet.
Good luck. Give no quarter. Because you will get no quarter. This is war, no matter how much you may want peace. Suckz to be around jerkz.
My barely Aug. rant, Friday I had a minor(to them) procedure done.
I had propofol. You know the stuff that put Michael Jackson to sleep, permanently?
It truly is like death.
They stuck the stuff in the IV, as I was drifting towards death I heard a nurse say “Wow, she’s fuckin’ freaky, right?”
I thought that quite rude. Then I floated around in white slippery clouds and decided I wasn’t breathing, so I must be dead.
Imagine my surprise when I woke up.