Banks, Banks, Banks.

Today I was feeling kind of motivated. I don't know why, I guess I'm just really enjoying the job in the city and the relaxation/satisfaction it brings. I'm being ultra productive and really enjoying myself at the same time. At work. Isn't there a law against that or something?

[WARNING Boring bit, feel free to skip] Yesterday I produced some reports which highlight items that haven't been marked in the database as completed, but by virtue of other facts, are.

I promise I wont bore you for long with this. Just an example, one of the company projects is laying cables for a client. Not just a few cables, but every cable required to build an aluminium refinery. Yup. A fucking big refinery in the Australian outback somewhere. But wait, it gets better. So remote is this place that our company are also building a powerstation for them. Oh, and the workers will need somewhere to live. And some have families. They need schools. They are basically laying every cable to build a town. From the massive stuff that takes power from the powerstation into the substations right down to the instrument cabling for the smoke detectors in the new homes. Fibre optics for communication, CAT 6 networking cables, so on and so on.

They are laying tens of thousands of kilometers of cable. And the database I've taken over developing keeps track of all these cables, right from the ordering, to the installation and testing, to the invoicing. And I noticed something. The invoices only get sent when a cable or piece of equipment has been marked in the database as installed. Out of curiosity I made a list of all the cables that had been invoiced. And of course a cable always has to go FROM one thing TO another thing, otherwise it's useless. I then cross referenced to see whether all the TO and FROM had been invoiced. Several thousand hadn't. Oooops.

I suspect someone will get fired for that but in the meantime everyone is happy that I've enabled them to send out more than $1m AUD of invoices that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. It's very small cash for a project that runs into billions but hey, I wouldn't mind 10% commission eh? [/ WARNING Boring Bit over]

So I turned up to work this morning pretty relaxed and checked my bank account. I rarely do this but the new job isn't really that intensive so I decided to add up my weekend spending instead. I noticed that I'd been charged for TT's dress twice. Hmmm. Do I go bank or go Myer? Work people said it was probably the bank at fault. I proceeded to tell them some stories about the useless Barclays Wank in the UK. And that reminded me: The saga is still ongoing. I've been sending them monthly reminders that the issue still isn't resolved and every other month they reply and say they're looking into it. So I sent them another reminder, quite a twisted one. Along the lines of:

Hi XXXX!

How are things? I hope you had a great Christmas and New Year?

Things here in Aus are still going well. You'd hate the way they do banking over here, they've got this wacky idea of keeping the customer happy, resolving problems, being honest and all sorts of stuff that I find alien to my experiences with yourselves.

Still, maybe it's the weather here. When it's so glorious no one wants a hard time so they just work together to sort things out. It's not so one sided as the UK where everything is a struggle.
Talking of which, you told me back in October that you would address my email after you returned from your holiday. When I reminded you three weeks later you said you had problems with your email. When I sent you a merry Christmas message and gentle reminder you didn't reply at all. I guess you weren't in the Christmas spirit.

I did send you another reminder in January but I think that must have got lost in the depths of your network, or eaten by a troll or something because you didn't reply to that either.
Hoping to hear from you soon, otherwise I'm going to have to find someone even more senior than you, and that's going to be pretty tough to do. Is the media senior to you? I could forward lots of stuff to them...

Patiently awaiting your attention,

Only Me.

What do you think? I'm rather looking forward to the reply but I wont be holding my breath.
Anyhoo, I then decided to check online with my new UK bank account to see how things faired there. Only to discover that they've banned internet banking from outside the UK in an effort to prevent fraud. GNNNAAAGHHH! What's the fucking point of that?! We can't check our balances from machines overseas! That's why I was so insistent on getting the online version of the bloody account! Stupid sods.

I emailed them and they emailed straight back. I've got to use telephone banking instead. Although they could confirm my identity from the email that isn't enough to enable telephone banking. They have to send a form to my parents in the UK, who have to send it to me in Aus, I have to sign it, send it back to the bank, they will send a PIN to my parents, who will send it to me and then I can pay to call the UK for a bank balance. Hmmm. Splendid. Fortunately my mother can forge my signature perfectly. So in reality they'll send it to her, she'll sign it and send it back, they'll send the PIN, she'll call to get my bank balance and email it to me. 3 weeks cut down to couple of days. But it used to be instant on the internet.

I LOVE Banks. I want to marry one because they make me so happy.