WestCrap

Am in the process of refinancing our mortgage because I am sure that there is a better deal out there and that my current bank Westpac seemingly gouges fees left right and centre continuously.  This process is underway and I am in the middle of getting the documentation together for this, but I had an incident yesterday with Westpac that pretty much sums up the relationship I am currently having…

We operate a savings account which doesn’t fully offset the mortgage (there is a long reason why, but that is another Westpac bureaucratic issue) so we operate our savings account on the margin to ensure all our dollars stay in the redraw account to save interest.

So on Wednesday I get an email from my sister in law Jill that the $200 she sends us for Niki to look after her son is on its way into the bank via internet direct deposit.  This is a process that has been repeated regularly for near 2 years without failure.  I think good, that $200 will cover the $130 Medibank direct debit that is coming out on the Thursday.  On Saturday however I check the accounts and am rudely awakened to the follow transaction details:

Wednesday:      $200 Balance, Available Funds $0 (pending clearance)

Thursday           $130 Direct Debit  Balance $70 Available Funds -$130

Friday:              Direct Debit Dishonoured, $130 credited to account, Balance $200, Available $0.

                        $200 cleared.  Available $200

                        FEE:  $50 for Direct Debit Dishonor, Available $150.

The bastards were sitting on $200 for 48hrs, didn’t clear it (why?) and yet chose to default on my Medibank payment, clear the funds AND THEN charge me $50 for their trouble.

Well I rang Westpac yesterday and ranted at them for a good 30 minutes in which they apologized, waived the fee and I still demanded to receive my last 6 months of mortgage statements because I was taking my business elsewhere.  I was very angry and I am still needing to go and see Medibank Private to pay them our monthly premium, but it was a very cathartic experience to virtually yell at a call centre employee and his manager… nothing beats a good rant at a poor sap at the other end when they do (well their company) does truly deserve it.

See you later Westpac… you’re goneskis!

 

                            

Miss Brooke

 

Great weekend for Brooke's birthday... Friday night was a good family night, followed by DINNER with Mum & Dad on Saturday night out at Chinese and then today was a picnic from 3pm onwards where we had a sausage sizzle...
The photo above is my favourite from this weekend :)
Happy Birthday Brookie!

Happy Birthday Brooke

Celebration today as its Brooke’s aka Lil’Bubba aka Bubba Ganoosh aka Nooshie’s 6^th Birthday.  She had a party yesterday afternoon for 20 kids at the Kids Club in Penrith and when I got home from work Niki was frazzled and the kids high on sugar and excitement.  We gave out the presents last night instead of the morning – which is disappointing I guess, but with today being a work / school day, we let her stay up late to play with them.  She got a “PollyPocket Playland” for her little Poly Pocket dolls and also another “Pixel Chix Shop” play thing which connects to her “Pixel Chix House” which she got at Xmas time…. If you don’t know what Polly Pockets or Pixel Chix are, then google is you friends ;-)

Tonight we’re having celebratory pizza for tea and tomorrow night will be dinner at a Chinese restaurant with my parents – Brooke chose Chinese, but asked that we don’t have the lobster that the waiter brings out lol! – and then on Sunday afternoon it’s a picnic at the river and bike riding with Niki’s side of the family and we’ll be having a sausage sizzle for tea.  Pretty full weekend ahead particularly when you add in Swimming for the girls, cricket for me and we have a friends Monique & Sean’s daughter Mya’s first birthday party on Sunday morning / lunch.

Its been a long week this week on the work front and this weekend is hectic as well, but it is a celebratory one!

Happy Birthday Brooke!!

Slaves to the Wheel?

Apologies for the infrequent postings, but things have been fairly hectic on the work front and I have also been leaving the laptop at work more often than not as I am now more inclined to play my PSP on the train than bash away on the emails…

Today though is different and I have just finished posting 15 emails on various work related issues between Glenbrook and where I am now – going through Ashfield. These are just the emails I didn’t get time to write yesterday on account of being so busy doing the work from the day before! For the record, I reduced my Unread Items list from 57 to 13 and have expunged about 120 emails into the delete box to keep below the 250MB limit we now have on our inboxes. A colleague of mine actually got a lock put on his email because he was sitting at 350MB. Can you imagine that!? Your work stopping you sending emails because you had too many! The Help Desks answer was to request an increase in quota from your manager. They simply killed off productivity because he was sitting at 350MB, but if you can get your boss to simply send an email authorizing a limit up to 500MB at a snap of the fingers. Given our boss is in transit between London and LA at the moment, the ability to get such a simple approval wasn’t able to be done. My colleague in question read everything he could, made all the phone calls he could and went home at 4pm… I wish they’d lock my account!!

It is amazing though how you can be a slave to the email… whenever our server is down at work, basically all productivity stops. People chat over the cube farm walls about social things… the coffee shop does a roaring trade and then if the outage happens late in the day, people slink away thinking that whatever was important can now be put aside until tomorrow.

You know the office scenes in movies with phones ringing and people scrambling? It just isn’t true anymore. The office environment is still and quiet with the occaisional phone call and when the A/C dies and the background hiss fades away, all you hear are the tapping of keys…. Tap-tap-tap….

Dirty Politics Howard Style

This stuff about Kevin Rudd having dinner with disgraced former Western Australia Premier Brian Burke is a complete beat up by John Howard and is soooo typical of the dirt campaign that can happen before an election.
In prior years, Howard has beaten up and embellished issues on national security to pull at the nations "fear of terrorism" to gain public support (Children Overboard anyone?) but given that that would be so obvious, Howard is now playing the man and not the ball by attacking Rudd's credibility.  And he's orchestrating it very cleverly too with Costello being the one throwing the barbs and insults and also getting long standing Liberal Ian Campbell to resign (or was he sacked... it depends on the PR spin) over effectively nothing is such an orchestration of dirt politics that it is blindingly obvious that its a set up.  Yet, the public - like with Children Overboard - seem oblivious and like lemmings this will have an impact on the polls.  Wake up Australia!  Time for a change... get rid of these fear mongering Liberals.
For those of you who have no idea of what I am rabbiting on about click here for related news coverage.

Wascoe Siding

Went to Wascoe Siding today with the girls and they went around on the little trains.

Place was packed and we managed to get some log space to sit on and the ground was pretty soggy because of all the rain, but for a couple of hours and a picnic lunch it was good.

When the sun got hot and the cloud burnt away, it got really steamy so we headed home...

More Breakages

Had a whine about things breaking yesterday but the problems continue! My laptop today was in the hands of helpdesk for 2hrs this morning as I seem to have been dropped off the network.

To try and put this into laymans terms, my profile wasn’t registered on the network and I had received directly from Microsoft a whole bunch of updates for Windows XP that weren’t meant to be received by people at my work. So instead of getting the updates that were compatible for our network via our server, I got a swag of them direct and a couple in particular screw around with the XML settings in and as such rendered a lot of my email system useless.

It also raised a massive issue with network security that my PC was connected directly to Microsoft and not through the firewalled server. That’s a no-no apparently! ;-)

In addition, I wasn’t able to roll back these changes because as soon as I did that I was bombarded with warnings from Microsoft that my PC wasn’t patched properly. So I had to have my security reset, my Windows rolled back, my automatic update settings tweaked and that took about 2hrs.

I am a walking technical black hole at the moment!

I might stay in bed tomorrow….

PS – the plumbing is out on some floors of the building and my floors toilets are one of the few levels that are working… so we’re getting a lot of traffic on our floor as people pop up for a Number 2!