Kristofers Blog

Yep.. another year has gone by…  blah

and of course it still sucks… woke up today with a nice ‘overdraft charge’ from my bank, $36 for a $2.21 negative balance.

Fine I guess I screwed up, when I looked at my account statement this morning the overdraft was dated for today, and the item that caused the overdraft was actually paid today…

The problem here is that there was an electronic funds transfer to my account today that covered everything fine… so there should not have been an overdraft.

I went back this to check my account because I went and made another cash deposit late this afternoon and I noticed something a bit odd, the dates had changed for the overdraft and for the item that cleared, they changed to yesterday..

so to go over that, this morning the overdraft and charge were dated 2-27-08, but this evening they are now dated 2-26-08… I’m confused here, how exactly did the dates change within a few hours?

I believe there’s something fishy going on here, would they change the dates to make sure they got their $36 overdraft charge? I’ve never had a problem with my bank before, been with them for seven over seven years now actually and I’d hate to have to change everything now…

there’s just something not right going on here… I emailed them as it was after business hours, we’ll see what they have to say about it tomorrow I guess…

Yep. Tomorrow, the 26th, my little blog will be 1yr old.

In that year what have I learned?

Well… not much.

I’ve learned that I’m too busy to worry about this blog. I guess that’s something, not that anyone actually reads it or anything right?

Kinda like talking to a wall, or one of my kids… when I ask a question on here I mean.. oh well.

…and the day after that I’ll be yet another year older, but not any wiser that’s for sure…

My 2yr old son Vincent is the coolest kid.. and actually he’s the best out of the three that I have, he listens, he’s polite (says thank you, your welcome, helps out) and he’s just all around fun to be with…

I was taking pictures last week of the Ultra M998 case I got for review and he decided he was going to help so he got out his toy camera and took some pictures as well, I thought it was cool..

He also likes those temporary tattoos that seem so popular now, OCZ sent me a big one with their Christmas  Card and I really didn’t have any use for it, so I figured I’d give it to him, he thinks it’s just so cool, he just loves it! Already a geek who knows quality stuff at 2yrs old! That’s my boy!

Does anyone know about AT&Ts retention program at all?

I’ve tried to find others out there with experiences with leaving AT&T and what they did to keep them but it’s few and far between, there’s quite a few for Cingular out there, which I guess is the same now…

any, so after I emailed them again with a few more questions they decided NOT to email me back and actually call me about this so I can’t copy and paste their responses..

but they told me that NO they do not normally tell people their contract is expired, they mentioned that users can easily find their contract information on the website where their account info is… I still think that’s wrong not to tell people about it, kind of cheating people that might want to leave…

and as for my upgrading the phone even though I never got one from them, they said oh well, if I want a new phone I have to pay the online prices with no special discounts… even though as I said I never got a phone from them in the first place, obviously they don’t care about keeping customers too much eh…

and they still couldn’t find my information and insist that I’ve only been a customer for the last 2 years since I became a Cingular customer, my time with AT&T before Cingular apparently doesn’t exist anymore..

hrmmm.. oh well, guess I’ll be checking out T-Mobile or Verizon now, wonder what specials they have over there?! Most of the people I deal with have Verizon so that’s sort of a good reason to switch to them, mobile-to-mobile would be free..

So I have AT&T wireless for my cellphone service and as of now my contract is up with them.

It should be as easy as just re-upping right? Well for me it’s not, while I’m happy with the service I don’t like how they do business overall and especially their customer service practices.

Most likely I’ll stay with them as I can get a phone call in my house so that makes me happy. I’ve tried Sprint and Cricket and about 75% of my calls were missed using their services.

Now I signed up with AT&T originally over three years ago, it’ll be four coming up, but in the middle there they switched to Cingular as everyone knows and now they switched back to ATT. The point is that I signed up for a 2yr contract originally with ATT, but the changeover to Cingular made things weird and I was told that I would have to switch over full time to Cingular, so of course I did and they told me that I would be out of my contract with ATT and start a new one with Cingular. So that’s fine I guess, I like the idea of rollover a lot, as of now I have a little over 2,000 minutes in my rollover, but what bugs me is that according to ATT I didn’t exist, or I didn’t have an account with them until this past two year contract. What happened to the time I was with ATT before the merger? I don’t understand that at all, it’s as if I didn’t exist to them, I only had about 4 months left on my original contract but switched because they told me that I had to, so where did the 20 months go?

The main reason I question all of this is because about 5 months ago my phone started acting up and I remembered that if you’re with ATT for a period of time you are eligible for a new phone, so I figured hey I should be fine right? Wrong apparently, because of this little thing were I didn’t exist, and they have no records of me being an ATT/Cingular customer before this current 2yr contract. So I was screwed there, no matter what I did, no matter what proof I had, original contracts etc, they said I wasn’t in their system so I wasn’t their customer… dunno.

Anyway, I have three phones, one is a smartphone that I rarely use anymore because it keeps locking up, and two others that are exactly the same, just basic cheapie flip phones that I don’t care if anything happens to. The point being is that those were my phones, and not something I got from ATT, I brought my own unlocked phones with me, so really shouldn’t I be entitled to a phone to begin with since I never got one from them?

The next gripe would have to be that  I was never told my contract was up now with ATT, I had to ask them when it was up and they said ‘now’. They text me, email me, snail-mail me all kinds of stupid offers and junk but yet they can’t notify me of something important like my contract being up with them? Why?

I don’t know.. actually I totally lost my train of thought towards the end there, my friend called me needing help with his computer and he’s one of those people that literally is lucky he can even find the power button, he’s just amazingly frustrating to try and explain things to. He doesn’t know what I mean when I ask him if he can see his desktop? I have to explain to him that it’s the screen where all the icons are… it’s just like WOW! I just want to scream right now from talking to him. He was here not more than two hours ago and I walked him through step by step on my computer and even wrote down instructions for him, which he didn’t follow and totally forgot what I showed him to do… sigh

hrmm..

I’m just looking at this site and why are my blog posts running together like that?

The last few posts are just jumbled together!

The entire Digg post is gone from the front page but yet still there listed on the side, and still accessible.. and the hackers post is jumbled into my other… grrrrrr

uhhh.. duh.. inside my post about working from home was some interesting code linking to a casino site… I know damn well I didn’t put it there………….. blah