This is a picture of me minutes after I lost my eyeglasses. I was taking taking two of my nieces on a jet ski ride and they wanted to do some tricks. So I did a few tricks. Tight turns basically and we all went flying.

These were not just any old pair of eyeglasses. These were prescription glasses. Expensive sunglasses. I wish I had a picture to show you because they were awesome. They were multi colored with shades of gray and lavender all swirled together. Not the greatest description but they rocked. Mostly because they held my hair up perfectly when I wore them as a head band, which was more frequently than I wore them as glasses.

I was berated for wearing my eyeglass frames as a hairband by my optometrist but they just did such a wonderful job, and it was a habit, I couldn’t stop. To this day I only choose glasses that don’t have the little nose thingies on them because they get tangled in my hair.

Anyway, We flew off the jet ski and surprisingly the shades stayed on my head. It wasn’t until I went underwater to get my hair out of my face that I lost them. When I came up I noticed my niece waving her arms and pointing to the water. Since I had water in my ears I couldn’t hear her but I looked to see my glasses floating down to the bottom of the lake.

Ever try diving underwater with a life jacket on? It doesn’t work. Those suckers keep you floating no matter how hard you try to go under.

The lake is 70 feet deep right there.

My glasses remain at the bottom of the lake. I think about them often because they looked so great. I doubt mine are the only ones at the bottom but I also doubt the DNR, or whoever drains lakes, would do such a thing just so I could get the pair back.

I did get another pair to replace the ones sitting at the bottom of the lake but they don’t stay on top of my head so well when used as a hairband. The look great on my face but what good are they if I can’t hold my hair back with them?

I don’t need another way to socialize with my friends online. I have my blog, Facebook, Twitter, my reader, email, linkedin (which I don’t use), Friend Feed (which I don’t use either), and the list could go on.

What the hell am I supposed to do with Google Buzz?

I use gmail and I work hard to clean out my inbox. Currently I have 897 emails in my inbox and I have spent the better part of the day trying to go through them and clean them up. I empty my spam folder daily. I hate seeing (23) next to any of my email boxes. Now I have Buzz and the number between the parentheses is constantly going higher and higher. All I need to do to clear it is click on it but when I get there I see people I know, one guy specifically, who are prattling on about one thing or another, usually followed by a link.

I’m sure I will find a way to annoy the hell out of everyone by broadcasting my blog to all of my Buzz followers but for now I don’t really know what I am supposed to do with it. Does it replace Facebook? I’d really like it if it did. I lose blocks of time when I go on Facebook so I try to stay away as much as possible. This makes me look like some kind of bitch because I feed my blog into Facebook, people read the post there instead of coming to my blog, make a comment on the Facebook post and then I have to go and comment on it there. If I had a few more hours in the day I would figure out how to automatically feed an excerpt of my posts into Facebook so readers had to leave the safety and security of the Facebook world and venture farther out into the web. But I haven’t had time so I’m stuck ignoring these people who refuse to read my posts on my blog. Bastards.

I’m not going to try to learn Buzz just yet. I presume it isn’t very difficult to learn, gmail was pretty easy and Google Docs has been a godsend. I need less social media and more hours in the day to actually get the work done that I am blowing off by playing with all these social meda apps.

It wouldn’t hurt if the public school system would hold classes every day during the work week too.

I talk to myself a lot. I also think out loud. Normally this isn’t a problem because I work from home and no one is around to hear me except the cat and the dog. When I have to make an important phone call I often practice the conversation. I consider what the other person would say so that I could have a response ready. I used to do this little exercise in my head but I have noticed lately that I am actually speaking the conversation out loud. I have even noticed that I don’t give them much air time. Even in  my practices I manage to hog the conversation. More often than not I speak the post I am thinking of writing before I sit down and bang it out on the keyboard. I hope I am not the only one who does this.

If I am in my home this is not a problem. The problem is that more often than not I catch myself as I am walking to the car or grocery shopping having conversations with myself. Several times I have commented to myself, out loud of course, that I have turned into one of those people you occasionally see on the street talking to no one. The people who usually live in a group home somewhere or on the street. I have also considered purchasing a BlueTooth headset so that I don’t look so silly or crazy. I have tried to hold my phone to my ear while having these practice conversations but usually they start spontaneously and I am talking long before I get the chance to get the phone to my ear. Putting the phone to my ear ultimately confuses me since I know I am not talking to someone. And, I worry that while I am holding the phone to my ear, pretending to talk to someone so I don’t look crazy,  the phone might actually ring. I don’t know how I would explain that but I am sure I would talk it out.

The reason I tell you this is because today I went to Office Max to get some office supplies. I picked out what I needed and brought them to the counter to have them rung up. The cashier, or team member, was a young man with piercings all over his face. He was also very tall. I purchased some card stock that was packaged in a cardboard envelope. The corner of all the packages of card stock had been crushed. I asked if I could open the package to make sure the card stock was not crushed as well since it would then have a difficult time going through my printer. He said no, not until I purchased it.

I didn’t get into it with him but I was a little irritated. I was also not properly dressed to have an argument with a team member. I had been preparing food for the big game and noticed, as I got out of my car at Office Max, that I had BBQ sauce all over the front of my shirt.

I let it go.

He scanned my two items as I swiped my card in the terminal. I thought to myself, as I always do when I have to swipe my card in the terminal, that there are very few things cashiers do anymore. In most grocery stores we have to bag our own items after running our cards ourselves. Cashiers used to do things like help you find things, answer your questions, ring up your purchase and bag your items. Now they just stand there to make sure the transaction is complete.

As I was thinking these thoughts the receipt printed and was spit out of the cash register. The receipt was right in front of me but I still think of the handing over of the receipt as the cashiers job. In fact I believe so strongly that this is their job I fear if I had grabbed it I would have been reprimanded, and rightfully so.

I stood there waiting for him to hand me my receipt but he didn’t. For a short moment we both stood there waiting for the other one to make a move.

Eventually he told me that I could grab my receipt.

“Don’t you do anything anymore?” I said not realizing I had actually said it.

“I suppose I could but you’re closer to it.” He said like a typical male teenager.

I grabbed my receipt and started walking away.

“I don’t know what the hell they pay you for. You’d think you could tear off one little receipt but I guess I can’t complain since you did bag my stuff for me, though you asked me if I needed a bag…” my little commentary went on but I was long out of the store by then.

Please tell me I am not the only one who does this.

****

I have some great Valentines Day things happening in the newsletter this week. You won’t find them in the blog. If you haven’t already signed up for it now is a great time to do so.

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In the last few weeks I have received many requests from companies asking me to tell my faithful readers about their products. I’ve been asked to write about diapers, make-up, facial tissue, and cell phones. Somewhere along the line, in the last few weeks apparently, Redhead Ranting has become a Mommy Blog.

It’s not.

I’ll repeat that.

I am not a Mommy Blogger. In fact when I had business cards printed this week that is exactly what I printed on the back side of the card. Not A Mommy Blog.

Yes, I talk about my kids but that doesn’t make me a mommy blogger. I found myself somewhat offended by this new status.

I have no problem writing about things I like and certainly no problem at all writing about things I don’t like. I’m not going to write about diapers however. We’ve been out of diapers for at least four years.

Not that I am against writing about these products but for cryin’ out loud send me some of the product or click on my advertising page and pay me to schlep your product.

Just last week I talked about the iPad, the Pope and the winter Olympics. So I have no trouble writing about brand name things. However, if you want to request that I say something specific about your product, rather than make fun of it, it would behoove the publicly traded companies to compensate me for my time and my real estate. I’d be really interested in blogging about a Mercedes, I don’t care what class.

I’ve worked really hard to get people to my blog, I am hardly going to send them to another website without getting paid for it.

As for being a mommy blog, if I ever refer to my kids as DD or DS, or start calling my ex husbands Dex#1 or #2 would someone please shoot me and put me, and my readers, out of my misery?

US Bank still sucks and apparently they don’t care. Just google the words “US Bank Sucks” and you get tons of sites stating as much. I found this one particularity interesting http://www.complaintsboard.com/bycompany/us-bank-a572.html.

I called my branch office yesterday to see if they would reverse the $200 in charges. I actually got rather livid with the person. And it felt good. She said to me if I had come in the bank, and the banker knew me, we probably could have stopped this mess. That’s when I got a little livid. I won’t rehash it here. They reversed $75 worth of fees. Woohoo.

Today, the transaction that I paid with a credit card because it had been sent back was presented for the second time. It showed as “pending” on my account. It also brought me back down to below zero causing more fees. I called the bank, they said they couldn’t gaurantee it would be stopped since it had already been paid. They will also charge me $30 for the service.

Why the hell is marked as “pending” then?

So I am in banking limbo until they update their system whatever the hell that means. Fuckers!

I’m thinking if they don’t turn this around I am printing up the list of “US Bank Sucks” and bringing it in there tomorrow. Saturdays are pretty busy for the bank.

What are they going to do? Close my account? Take away my birthday?

Bring it on!

Fuckers.

I bank at US Bank.

They suck.

Let me explain. Last week a client sent me a check, a good sized check. The check should have arrived in one to two days. As of yesterday it had still not arrived. Auto payments were beginning to hit my account causing a negative balance along with over draft fees of $37.50 each. I spoke with the client, whom I trust completely, and they assured me the check had been mailed. The client, who also banks with US Bank and at the same branch (but lives 200 miles from here) I might add, felt horrible about what was happening. I called the bank to explain to them what was happening and to find out if there was anything we could do since both of us banked at the same bank.

The first woman I talked to said all we had to do was have the client call and make a transfer to my account. She said it was an easy transaction since we both banked there.

The client then called the bank to make the transfer and to stop payment on the check that was lost in the mail. The person she spoke to informed her that she could not make a deposit into my account without being a signer on my account.

I know, WTF?

The bank suggested she do a “bill pay” through the bank system, however that would take at least three days to process. Meanwhile I am now overdrawn by more than $700, $150 of which was overdraft fees. So far the bank had not returned any payments. Not because they were being nice, they just hadn’t gone through the system yet.

I called the bank again and talked to some woman who was clearly bored with my story. She kept sighing as I tried to explain to her what was going on. Eventually it became clear that she was not the person I need to talk to and forwarded me on to someone else.

I asked this banker if they were going to return the payments that had hit and caused overdrafts. She told me she didn’t know.

My plan was to have the bank return the payments and I would make them with a credit card. Return the payments if I wasn’t going to be charged a fee for them.

“You are going to charge me $37.50 no matter what right?” I asked her.

“Yes” she said.

“Let me just be clear, if you honor the checks, which will cause me to be overdrawn you will charge me $37.50 per check, and if you return the checks, which would mean I am no longer overdrawn you are still going to charge me for being overdrawn for a few hours today, which will cause me to again be overdrawn?” I asked

“Yes”

“And you don’t know if these checks will be returned or honored” I asked.

“No, there is no way for me to know if the checks will be processed or returned” she said.

So, since I was going to be charged anyway I figured let’s just let it play out and maybe they will honor the checks. It would simply mean one less hassle in tracking down the returned checks and getting them squared with the businesses I sent them to. Checks usually get presented twice so clearing that up could take possibly two weeks.

I decided to let ‘em ride and see what happens.

Today, I logged into the bank and saw that they had returned the checks and charged me all kinds of fees, returned check fees and overdraft fees.

US Bank received $6.6 Billion in the bank bailout.

In November of last year they charged me $37.50 because I was 8 cents overdrawn. They did honor the check however. That was really nice of them I must say.

Don’t get me wrong, this is my fault. The bank didn’t cause any of this to happen. However, they could have helped to minimize the costs of this snowball effect by allowing the client to transfer money into my account. I understand that people just can’t call and take money out of another person’s account but if people want to put their own money into someone’s account why should the bank prevent that?

Because the bank can’t charge $37.50 for each check that bounces if they do. That’s why.

I’ve been banking with US Bank for 12 years or so. I bank there because they are convenient and they have ATMs everywhere. Speaking of their ATMs, they have a little voice that comes on when you start the transaction. It is a woman’s voice which happens to have a very distinct British accent. It’s US Bank for crying out loud why the fuck do they use a British voice? Anyway, because of this recession, being a single mom, my inability to inherit gobs of money from a long lost relative, and because I have no net, I end up paying a lot of fees to this bank. If a client doesn’t pay on time or child support isn’t paid I still have to pay my bills and feed my kids. Because I run my account to the bottom and because I have no net to cover my ass when that happens I just assume the bank charges are a way of life and that I am a loser so I must just suck it up and pay it willingly.

I have asked, sheepishly because I am intimidated by the banks (see all the reasons above), for them to reverse fees from time to time. And they have, one, as a courtesy.

Even though I have had other deposits since this mess began I am still out all the overdraft fees which makes me still in the red because I have still not received the check that started the whole thing. The client and I have worked that out but it will still take a couple of days to get into my account. The bank isn’t finished charging me fees yet either. There are two pending today and then there will be the fees for having a negative balance.

Did I mention US Bank received $6.6 Billion in the bailout?

I’m paying their wages, I’m paying for their jets, and Mercedes and lake homes in foreign countries. I’m not talking about the bailout here, I’m just talking the fees they charge me. I’m paying for all these things and right now I can’t buy a gallon of milk.