I miss…

having a positive balance in my bank account.

Circus

Today, for several reasons, is going to be quite a circus. For starters, I had to be at work at 6:30 in the AM, and I’ve been on my feet ever since running hither and thither and yon. I’m supposed to stay until 7 or so… and that’s not going to happen because, tonight, I really am going to the circus.

Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey

It ought to be a real treat… I just hope I can afford to park.

Why you must always read the fine print.

So I’m perusing through my bank’s web-acceess this past week trying to make sure I have enough funds in my account to pay the bills when I find something startling. Low and behold, My checking account is overdrawn by over $90. What the heck? Turns out I was charged an annual fee of $100 which I wasn’t expecting.

So I call up the bank and say something to the effect of, “Hey, I was told there was no annual fee on this account because I have a mortgage through you with sufficient balance.” To which they reply, “Sir, your mortgage’s balance is less that $250,000. Therefore the fee is not waved.”

“What?!” I said. “Representative Regina told me I only had to have $150,000 total balance for the fee to be waived. This doesn’t make sense. Let me check my records.” My records, of course, in the fine print, agreed with the bank. Needless to say, I’m feeling a tad angry at this point. “What do I have to do to get this taken care of?”

“You’ll have to talk with your local Representative,” he says. Now, the fun part of the story comes: Representative Regina left the job at the bank (or was she fired?). After unsuccessfully navigating the bank’s phone-tree for about 20 minutes, I finally got in touch with a new local rep… not my original one, or even the one that is listed on the account, but a third one… and she, bless her, refunded the fee and converted my account to something that’s free.

So now we’re all happy and hunky-dory. I was lucky that I had an understanding rep. But the lesson to be learned is that you should always read the fine print before you sign up for anything… especially if it seems too good to be true.

A Theory about the Very Religious

I ask in advance for forgiveness from my friends who are more religious than I. In the next few paragraphs, I plan to raise a question that’s been on my mind since i read Arpy’s latest devotion on her blood:Hope site. I’m going to call into question what defines faith for some people, so read on with a grain of salt, knowing that this is just something I’m wondering about, not something I believe.

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A few years ago, I read the book, “Xenocide,” by Orson Scott Card, the third in the Ender saga. In it was described a planet where lived a people who were enormously intellegent, but also suffered from severe Obcessive Compulsive Disorder. There are several scenes where one of the main characters (from this world) feels forced to purify herself with a ritual that could almost be considered self-destructive. The preface to the novel described a little about how thorough Mr. Card’s resarch of the disease was.

When I read the “devo” on blood:hope, I got to thinking… Isn’t “cutting” a ritual to releive some sort of visceral pressure? Isn’t it almost a ritual for these people? Doesn’t the prayer, and the communing with God also fall into a similar category? I said to myself, “Self, what if those people that I always found to be stuck-up, over-zealous, religious snobs were really people suffering from some form of OCD?” Could feeling the will of the lord actually be feeling the releif after completing the ritual to the satisfaction of the disorder?

I don’t know the answer… Faith is a personal matter and I shouldn’t make blanket statements about those… Especially inflamitory statements like the one I think I have implied.

But it does make me wonder…. maybe it is worth looking into, researching the symptoms of OCD and comparing them to the manifestation of faith in the zealotry.

Server Move

Following up my earlier post, A New Home…

All the preparations for the move are complete… My office is a skeleton of what it once was, and my cube’s locks have been re-cored. I’ve hidden almost all the crap that was down here in a store room, and brought up some moving boxes to pack the rest of my crud into.

Tomorrow, my computer will move to it’s new home, teathered to the underside of a desk in the cubicle on the fifth floor. The new IP address and DNS name have been prepared. It is only a matter of time. Resistance is futile. We shall see if alurio.org survives the trip.

As Agent Smith says, “It is inevitable.”