I hear you singing in the wire. I can hear you thru the whine. And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line.

Ok, so yeah, I've been gone a long time and whatever.So where have we been, what have we been doing? Well for starters, Kristen and I were married 9/9/06. Wow, I haven't written since august of 06. Wow. Anyways, the wedding was awesome and so was the honeymoon. I know I talk a lot of shit sometimes but we all know the truth, she has my balls in her purse and if I'm a good boy I get to have them once in a while. In July of '07 I quit my job as an Assistant Store Manager with Safeway for a lot of reasons, the main one being that I was getting no support from the corporate office oh yeah and they also wouldn't let me run the store I had been running because I wasn't old enough. So they let some other guy run it and I lost all my workers. Oh well, now I work for Target in Milwaukee, WI and Kristen is a child care provider who gets to deal with her nuttier than squirrel turds boss. I'm going back to school, trying to get my Bachelors in Supply Chain Management. But the biggest news, besides the wedding is that we're going to have a baby!!! Kristen is 11 weeks along as of today and we're frickin' excited! So other than moving, getting married, and making babies, that's pretty much it. It's good to be back! And now for the rants...

chase Bank(remember, I don't capitalize things I hate): In a nutshell, you guys suck. Definitely the worst bank I have ever had to deal with. How you've managed to stay in business so long baffles me. Your employees need customer service training, and your computer system needs to um oh let's see, uh not steal my money.

Let's analyze shall we?

Activity for ....

Transactions 1 - 32

Present Balance: ($56.35)

Search Transactions

Available Balance: ($56.35)

Date	Description	Debit	Credit	Balance
02/06/2008	ING DIRECT DEPOSIT PPD ID: 1510394779		$0.05	($56.35)
02/06/2008	ING DIRECT DEPOSIT PPD ID: 1510394779		$0.06	($56.40)
02/05/2008	INSUFFICIENT FUNDS FEE	$32.00		($56.46)
02/05/2008	DEPOSIT (view)		$10.00	($24.46)
02/04/2008	MATC-SOUTH-BOOKSTORE OAK 01/31MATC-SOUT	$3.90		($34.46)
02/04/2008	INSUFFICIENT FUNDS FEE	$32.00		($30.56)
02/04/2008	Online Transfer: Service Fee	$3.00		$1.44
02/04/2008	DEPOSIT ID NUMBER 375550 (view)		$14.00	$4.44
02/01/2008	CLARK 8414 MILWAUKEE WI 01/31CLARK 841	$20.00		($9.56)
02/01/2008	Online Transfer 111645330 to Suntrust #########1617 transaction #: 111645330	$340.00		$10.44
01/31/2008	DEPOSIT ID NUMBER 957894 (view)		$347.23	$350.44

Ok, so as you can see on 1-31 at the end of the day, we had $350.44 available. We then transferred $340.00 of that to our Suntrust Bank account that we still have for some reason. Ok, that left us with $10.44. I used the card for $20 in gas, so basically 2 gallons, on the first. Then I realized over the weekend "Oh hell, I only meant to use $10". So on Monday, the 4th, Kristen put $14 to bring us back to positive. Ok, cool, end of story right? Ha, not with chase! On Monday the 4th they decided to charge me for the transfer of my money to the Suntrust account. Hmm, they couldn't have done that on the 1st when they transferred the money in the first place? Interesting! Ok, well thinking that we were gravy with $4.44 in the bank (keeping in mind that of course it takes 2-3 days for this stuff to show up on my online account) I needed some supplies for school. Just notebooks and folders to get ready for this semester. So I made sure to keep the total under $4.44 which I thought we had. I spent $3.90 which should have left us with 54 cents. Pathetic I know, but still...well then Kristen put $10 in the bank to try and cover us because of course we did not know about the overdraft fees yet. I then linked my ING savings account with chase, still not knowing my account was overdrawn. ING did their little test transfer, which is the 5 and 6 cents things and everything was cool. Well today, Thursday the 7th, I get up and go to chase bank's website. I see that my account is way overdrawn. I called and talked to Lillian Clayton, who I can assure you doesn't teach the aforementioned customer service classes that chase employees need. She assured me that this was not chase bank's oversight and that both of the overdraft fees were legit. I told her that I found it surprising that in chase's mission statement one of their goals was to get Ben Waber to kill himself. I never saw that in there before, but who am I to argue. So after I hung up on her, I decided to do a little research to see if maybe oh just maybe Big Brother Bank is right and I am wrong. Ok, even though I'm an honest man (well not really, but humor me) and a nice man (again please humor) I cannot see where chase bank can justify these charges. I made a mistake about the gas, oops sorry. I tried to cover it up on Monday. Now let me point out that if I use my debit card or withdraw any money, you bet your ass it comes out of my account within seconds. But if I put money in, or get money transferred, it takes days to show up online. So kind of my mistake, but I shouldn't have to pay an arm and a leg for a simple mistake. Plus I tried to fix it, it's not like I let it slide, and besides, I wouldn't have kept using the card if I had known they were going to charge me $32 every time I blinked. Oh, but don't worry, soon I'm going to be getting charged $6 a day for being overdrawn on my account. And even though they won't start until today or tomorrow, they'll still backtrack it to charge me $6 from the time I originally was overdrawn. Look, bottom line is I shouldn't have to pay eventually almost $100 bucks for a $20 tank of gas. That shouldn't have to happen until the damn democrats take over hehehe. Moving on...

directv...oh sweet television, how I love you so, and with the 50 inches of pure high definition bliss that oozes out of your sexy gray and black body it makes me wonder how I ever lived without you. Ok, when we moved to Wisconsin (remember I'll catch everyone up shortly), we signed up for time warner cable. We got tv, internet, and phone for like $150. I know that sucks, but anyway...so a couple of weeks ago directv sends me this awesome e-mail saying how they've missed us as customers and if we come back they have a rockin' sweet deal for us. Well they know how to win me over, just say rockin' sweet deal and tv in the same sentence and I'm on it. So I sign up for it. Step 2 is asking my wife if it's ok...notice that asking is step 2. With my wife Kristen, it's easier to just go ahead and do it first then ask/explain/apologize/pay the hooker/cancel the service etc. So after I get everything all set up with directv, I call my beautiful wife and ask her if I can switch back to directv. I receive her blessing as long as with tv, internet and phone, it is cheaper than time warner. I assure her, truthfully by the way, that it is. The deal I am offered is this: Plus Package DVR for $39.99 since I have an HDTV, I would also like the HD package. No problem I am assured, for an extra $9.99 a month, I have all the HD my eyes can handle. But wait, it gets better, this nice gentleman gives me a new dish, and a new HD DVR AND a rebate on the HD programming so that my bill will only be $39.98 a month. Great success! Ha, it was not to be. I get the dish, the receiver, which I installed all by myself because Mr. Crosseyed over at premier communications didn't want to install it for me because it was too cold...wah. So I get everything hooked up, and I'm ready and oh baby here it comes channel surfing time and...nothing! "Please call customer service Message 711" is on my screen. So I talk to customer service and he tells me that not only was I never signed up for any service, but he can't give me those channels at those rates because he doesn't know the e-mail I am talking about. So I e-mail their service center and we're still waiting.

vonage...oh vonage you make things so hard don't you. I have an existing phone number, I have DSL, I want to go to vonage because it's so much cheaper. No problem I am assured. But by now I realize that no problem is customer service code for "there's going to be so many problems with the simple transaction I am about to perform that you are going to start drinking and call me the dreaded c-word within a week's time". Ok, vonage simple task #1: Take my time warner cable phone number we'll call it 414-123-4567 and make it yours. No can do Mr. Waber, because it's already been canceled. Ok vonage, let's try this: Take my DSL phone number, we'll call it 414-123-1111 and make that one yours. Ok, Mr. Waber, you're all set your vonage phone number is 414-123-1111. Excellent. Tick tock, tick tock, oh wait, now Mr. Waber can't sign on to the goddamn internet because the DSL number that vonage took was the only number that AT&T DSL knew to connect to. It's ok, I'm working on conversation #3 with Shekie Ihateamericans to fix the problem. Hmm...


Later everyone...next time will be shorter!