Motherfucking banks.

So I went in specifically the other week to enquire what the balance of my personal loan was.

$200, and some change, plus some interest.
Yay!

And then the next automated payment on it came out of my account.
$350
Boo!

So I went in, and queried this, and had about the most condescending fuckhead say "well, that's the balance of the principal, not the payout amount. "
"And the difference is...?"
"Well, there'll be interest on that...."
"10 % pa on $212 over a week ... is $150 interest? Try again."
"I'll just check with the loan centre..."
*pause*
"I'm sorry, the extra was deducted by mistake, and will be refunded to your savings account within 5-7 working days."
"Plus interest?"
"Excuse me?"
"Well, you've had my money for two weeks by then - I'm losing interest on it. Will that also be refunded?"
"Um...."

So I didn't have time to argue with them this morning, but I *will* be calling them this afternoon to explain that as far as I'm concerned, I had a contrctual agreement with them allowing them to remove money from my account up to the amount of the loan plus interest. If they have taken more than that out, they have done so without my permission, and 5-7 days is an utterly unnacceptable period of time to wait for them to refund it. Gar.

Gar, I say!

Fucking banks.

Credit union for me, I think, from now on.

sol.
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That's _Mr_ Petulant Prima-Donna to you...

So this morning, I was a bit snappy with our Product Quality Assurance group, having been dragged away from a customer-visible, already-reported-in-the-wild, affecting-the-functionality-of-our-product, prioritised bug (that should never have passed PQA ;) to be shown that yes, in fact, the combination of Netscape 4.78 and Windows 2000 did lead to CSS/rendering issues on one of our testers boxes. The *first* time such an issue was raised, I tested it with netscape 4.77 on windows 2000, was unable to replicate it, and suggested that it was a specific issue with either the testers box or netscape 4.78, and either way was sufficiently far along the diminishing returns curve that perhaps we could safely ignore it until a real live user reported it. This morning, my words may have been a bit more along the lines of "Yes, and I'll fucking fix it when a fucking user with NS4.78 and W2K reports it, and it will be a COLD DAY IN HELL."

SO my line manager sends me a polite email suggesting that while such behaviour was ok in his office, indulged in publicly it may give the impression that I was a petulant prima-donna (though of course *he* knew that wasn't true), and that he was working very hard to maintain the professional reputation of the Development group and perhaps behaviour like that didn't help.

Which is fair enough, and I probably shouldn;t have raised my voice and stormed out of the PQA room. SO I went back to apologise for my unprofessional outburst and poor behaviour. At which point the entire PQA team looked blankly at me until one of them said "Oh! You mean your Spack attack. No worries.". And the guy I had in fact been shouting at said "Oh. I must have been having one of my own - I didn't even notice.".

It's nice having workmates who understand developers :)

sol.
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