Dark Thoughts

If there's one thing I despise more than religious nutters, it's banks. I got hit for a $45 fee yesterday for a refused transaction, this is despite the fact that I had transferred money, and it had been debitted from my other account, but for some reason it hadn't cleared into the account where the direct debit came from. Now to put this in perspective the debit was for $131 and it would have left me $50 in the red in that account (if the transfer hadn't taken place). $45 is 34% of the total transfer or 90% of the amount I would have been in credit!!! And it's not as though the transaction is out of the ordinary. Every month for the past 10 years there has been money getting depositted to that account. Every other month the amount clears overnight, but not this time, and now that the amount is 1 day late, I cop this obscene fee.

If I had only had $1 in the account then it would have been OK for the bank to overdraw my account by $44, but it's not OK for the transaction to go through as it stands. It begar's belief.

How can a bank justify these fees? There is no way that a an electronic transaction can possibly cost $45. Heck I can get a new phone line installed into my house for that price, and send gigabytes of data around the planet. It's no wonder that they are recording record profits, because they are ripping off their customers, and the ones that can least afford it. I wouldn't put myself in that category, as I'm doing quite well, but this fee is aimed at those with low account balances, and who rely on apportioning payments accross the year through the use of direct debits. Most direct debits are in the region of $50 to $100 and a $45 fee on one of these would mean no food on the table for some families, let alone half a dozen a year.

Perhaps the banks justify it by seeing it as a fine. All well and good, except that the bank is a service provided to customers, not a police force.

On a more positive note, you may have noticed a change in design to the Dark Thoughts blog. While I really liked the old design, the little goblins behind the scenes at blogger.com changed something, so my old template left a huge chunk of blank space at the top of the blog. So the new one now has splashes of orange throughout. Why orange, I've been asked, well, it was the colour programmed for the headings in the original template that I hacked, and I really couldn't be bothered trying to find a different colour and reprogram all of the fields, and besides, the orange looks quite nice anyway, and matches the blogger logo at the bottom of the page.

Other stuff that's happened since yesterday.

Jodie was in a fit of anger last night because her computer had a "Install new hardware" message (due to the motherboard sound card not being disabled) and then because her karaoke function on her stereo wouldn't work when she went to scream her lungs out to her favourite angry song to seek solace. This was due to the minijack-jack convertor being broken, and I think also due to the small minijack on her stereo.

Minijacks are notoriously dodgy, and it is the reason why muso's avoid them like the plague in their audio systems. There simply isn't enough room to make a good electrical contact, and their small size means that the mechanical strength of the connection is always in question. The cable also isn't of the highest quality so the contact with the XLR connector on the mic also isn't the best, but I found a new convertor, tested the cable, and got it all working, but it was too late by then. Jodie had had enough.

Anyway, the good new is that the karaoke is working (well, good news for Jodie anyway :P), and the computer is functioning again (sans the zip drive and CD burner - due to one of the IDE Channels failing).

I wrote an awesome trance bass line last night but the glitches over mLAN meant that I couldn't record it, and then Cubase went down. I'm getting a bit annoyed at this whole Cubase/mLAN thing. It's great when it works, but almost impossible to fix when it doesn't. I just want to sit down and write some music dammit.