I did not accept his apology and I got off the phone as quickly as possible. I didn't mention to him that he failed to reverse my incorrect overdraft fee, only because I knew, based on my latest experience with him, that he had no intention of rectifying his mistakes or behavior.

To add insult to injury, the branch manager also called to "apologize" that I felt I had a bad experience, and then proceeded to back up Andre's position and actually offered to close my account over the phone, and bordered on insistent when I said I'd take care of at my own convenience.

Wow.

But, then I got a letter from the CEO office. The photo of the letter is here, and the text is below:

Dear Mr. Fortuny:

Thank you for your letter addressed to Mr. Richard K. Davis, Chairman, President and CEO of U.S. Bancorp. I have been asked to provide you with a response on behalf of Mr. Davis and the other recipients of your correspondence.

Foremost, please accept our sincere apologies for the service experience provided at U.S. Bank's Kirkland branch office. We are troubled by any instance when a customer feels that our personnel failed to deliver on our commitment to service, and your letter clearly details an experience that was not favorable. Our office has provided a copy of your complaint to Mr. Derek Pender, Bellevue Metro District Manager, and we understand that Jamie Cox has recently been in contact with you about this matter.

U.S. Bank makes every effort to ensure that our employees have the tools and support necessary to promptly and accurately address the questions and concerns our customers may pose, and we regret that your visit to the branch did not leave a more favorable impression of our products and services.

As you may already be aware, U.S. Bank has honored your request to opt out of our general overdraft limits for your account, and this designation will remain in effect unless you inform us otherwise. However, we request that you immediately return the original copy of our internal procedure for this service. Please return this document to my attention at our letterhead address. The documentation for U.S. Bank's policies and procedures is proprietary information, and you are hereby notified to not copy or disseminate this procedure.

We appreciate that you took the time to share your concerns, and look forward to the opportunity to better meet your expectation in your future.

Sincerely,
William Williamson
Executive Communications
for Richard K. Davis
Chairman, President and CEO
U.S. Bancorp


cc: Derek Pender, Bellevue Metro District Manager, Jamie Cox, Branch Manager, Kirkland Office

Frankly, I like the apology. It's to the point and it comes from the CEO's office. I do not like this demand to return the OBP procedure document. Hmm. Just how do I inform Mr. Williamson that his precious super secret document is already all over the internet and I intend on making it even more all over the internet just because of his demand?

That's it for this chapter, but I suspect it's not over.

As for the overdraft protection, it took two weeks, but I finally got a confirmation letter confirming that courtesy overdraft protection is removed from my account. Fantastic.

Oh, btw, if you want to write a letter to US Bancorp CEO Richard K. Davis, here's the address that actually got me a response:

US Bancorp, The Office of the Corp. Secretary
Richard K. David, Chairman, President & CEO
800 Nicollet Mall
Minneapolis, MN. 55402

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Turns out that Federal banking regulations require banks to allow customers to opt out of so-called "courtesy" overdraft protection systems. When you opt out, any charges that can't be covered by your current available balance will be declined.

Here's how it works when you turn off overdraft protection: if you have $500 in the bank, you clear a $490 check, and then you try to make a $30 purchase with your debit card, the charge will be declined. In this instance you won't have a pesky $28-$35 overdraft fee per overdrawn item, plus a $7-$10/day negative balance fee.

However, this opt-out does not save your ass if, for example, you do pay-at-the-pump authorizations, where they only ping your card for a dollar and let you go on your way with a full tank of gas, and the final charge overdrafts you. In this case, you still pay a fee. This also happens when you go out to dinner and your final total doesn't clear until the tip is factored in. To avoid this, always pay at the gas counter with a set amount instead of at the pump, and always tip your server in cash.

How to opt-out of courtesy overdraft

Every bank has a different term and system, but the rules are generally the same:

Don't backup your account with a credit card or savings account

This is scam #2 in the banking universe. While bankers will try to convince you to trade in your overdraft protection for credit card protection, it's still a bad idea. US Bank, for example, charges for every overdraft incident where money from a protection source is applied to your account. You may pay as little as $5, but you're still paying for the privilege of US Bank automatically transferring money from one of your accounts to another, a service that's free when you do it yourself online or through the automated phone system, or only $2 when you have a telephone banker do it.

How I came to know all this: horrible customer service

Back in December, I called up US Bank about an overdraft fee I had. It was totally my fault, so I didn't ask them to fix it. I just asked if there's anything else I could do to turn off overdraft protection. That must have been the magic word because the telephone banking rep said he could turn off courtesy overdraft protection for me over the phone.

Of course, when I had an overdraft in January, I was pissed. I called again, got another rep who confirmed the same courtesy overdraft protection but said I had to go to my local branch to do it. So I went to my branch on January 11.

I waited 10 minutes in the bank lobby while Andre Branch, the football player sized assistant manager, chatted for 10 minutes on the phone with someone about non-business stuff. When he was finally ready to see me, I retold him my story and said I wanted to cancel my courtesy overdraft protection. He looked at me confused and said he didn't understand. I tried to explain it to him for several more minutes.

Finally, he said, "let me talk to my people." He picked up the phone, dialed a number and said, "do you know what this guy is talking about?" as he looked across the room. I looked, too, and he had dialed one of the tellers to ask her! She didn't know, either, so he suggested that what I was asking for didn't exist. I suggested that maybe he should do a little more research.

He called his district office while I called telephone banking again. I confirmed for a third time that you can opt out of courtesy overdraft protection. Once the manager heard me confirm it, he piped in that he knew it now and it was called "OBP code" (thus leading to my research above -- thanks Consumerist, the world's best consumer advocate website!).

He hassled me if I really wanted to do this, emphasized that the change was permanent, and I confirmed. While he was putting codes into the computer, he made the off-hand comment, "I'm not surprised nobody else knew about this. It's a very obscure feature."

To which I replied, "three telephone bankers knew about this feature. You're an assistant branch manager. You really should know. There's no excuse," and glared at him.

Then he got pissy: "look, I've been nothing but nice to you and I've done everything you've asked, and now you're being a smart ass." "Excuse me?" "You heard me. You brought it, now I'm bringin' it. You can go sit in the lobby." "I'm not done, no thank you." "You can go sit in the lobby."

(Please note that I had asked him to reverse my latest overdraft fee as a courtesy for this mix-up. It has not been reversed.)

At which point I went home and wrote a complaint letter to the branch manager, the central banking management office and the CEO. The branch letter was delivered the next Monday. In the letter, I detailed the incident, and included a copy of the US Bank internal memo about OBP Code 09 that was dated August 2007 as evidence that the assistant branch manager should have known about the feature, or knew about it and tried to deceive me, which either makes him incompetent or a liar.

You can see the response I got here.

(Last note: I try to keep my banking balance at zero because I transfer all my money into my PayPal Mastercard debit card, which gives me 5.2% APY on my balance and pays 1% cash back immediately for every credit purchase. It also doesn't charge overdraft fees or negative balance fees. The only time I have money in my US Bank account is when I need to pay rent. However, once in a while an organization will have my old card on file and I'll forget that detail. I'd rather be notified that an old charge somewhere was declined rather than incur more dastardly overdraft fees.)

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You can view your current version of flash at Adobe's self service site.

Download rfjason's flash installer for Windows IE/FF/Op

flash_win_9_0_47.exe (2.41mb)

This package runs through Adobe's uninstall utility, manually removes registry entries, then installs the plug-in/activex packages for Firefox and IE. I hear this works on Opera, too.

If you can't use this installer, you're welcome to manually downgrade at Adobe's archive.

So what happened? The latest version of flash supports the new x-embed standard, h.264, aac and fullscreen video acceleration. The current argument rages whether Adobe broke hardware acceleration, or whether the x-embed code does something stupid like tons of memcopys. Either way, the latest version sucks.

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Lulz & FTW Cards

Bank Notes

Download Printable PDFs

Each PDF is designed for printing on standard 8.5"x11" color printers. For the money, ordinary copy paper will work. For the board and cards, I recommend using heavy stock paper for about $11 online, or $15 at your local office supply store. You'll also need to cut everything yourself. See related links for shopping options.

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xerox 60lb 98 brightness at Amazon.com

X-Acto Paper Trimmer at Amazon.com

Here is an overlay of the Enterprise on the Seattle Center. At 643 meters in length, notice how it dwarfs the Space Needle, EMP, Key Arena, Childrens Museum, and IMAX. See also: In relation to the University of Washington, and in relation to Qwest Field and Safeco Field. The saucer section is 467 meters wide, which is 510 yards, or about five football fields.

Here's what the Seattle sky line would look like if the Enterprise were to fly over it. As you can see, the Enterprise is just about 7 city blocks long, and taller than a 40 story building.

Over the Pentagon. I tried to center the bridge over Ground Zero Cafe. Let's see if that freaks the Russians out some more. (Only Pentagon know-it-alls will get that joke.)

The Ellipse at The White House. The Ellipse circumference is about the same as the dorsal phaser array. The White House occupies about the same area as the rear shield grid.

The Colosseum in Rome. There's really no comparison here. The Colosseum doesn't even occupy the same space as the top six decks. Those of you who have seen the Colosseum (me!) are getting a sense of just how big the Enterprise-D really is.

Computer, arch! The St. Louis Arch is 630ft high and 630ft wide at its base. That's 192 meters versus the saucer section's 467 meters. Ignore the skyscrapers in the background which are obviously at a distance from the Arch and do not reflect a comparative size to the Enterprise.

Over Liberty Island, NY.

Over and cross sectioned with Manhattan. Even this city's enormity is brought into perspective when you put the entire ship on it. Whoever initially described the Ent-D as a "city in space" wasn't kidding!

And if Wil Wheaton is reading this, since you were kind enough to link here, it turns out the Enterprise is about the size the of Paramount lot after all.

(disclaimer: all calculations were done using comparative mapping and data using Google Maps, Ex Astris Scientia, and TNG Trek Core. Accuracy +/- a few pixels.)

Goodbye, Seattle!

And last, but not least, my gift to the people of Seattle for last weekend's Memorial Day holiday.

It's bad enough that you've done this to me multiple times. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of customers similarly entrust their privacy to you, only to have you toss it aside like a used condom?

Comcast's supervisor policy leaves a little to be desired as well: if you request a supervisor, you're promised a callback within 1 hour or 24 hours, depending on the rep you talk to. Naturally, I've been waiting for a supervisor to call me for 32 hours now.

Oh, and don't forget that Comcast plans on charging for tech support next month. Way to go, asscakes.

Anyway.

I'm keeping FIOS for one simple reason: FIOS doesn't choke like Comcast does.

Let's say you're downloading a 350mb or 700mb torrent from a few thousand sources. With Comcast, your bandwidth becomes completely useless. Even if you're only downloading at 100kbit/s and uploading at 45kbit/s, you can't browse, check e-mail, ping, or do anything. Comcast cripples you mercilessly. If you have Comcast right now, you know what I'm talking about.

With FIOS, I can download up to four torrents at 80kbit/s to 300kbit/s, and not even feel it while browsing and checking e-mail. I'll hand it to you, Verizon: this is wonderful. Ping latency during MPD (massively parallel downloading) torrents only goes up slightly to the point it's not even worth reporting.

So, yes, I still despise the fact that I'm giving money to the unholy seed of bad service Verizon. But, at least I'm getting some pretty decent internet in exchange.

We Don't Need No Steenking Taxes

There is one odd point that showed up. My 2nd month bill was precisely $34.95, the rate I'm okay being stuck with. No taxes, no fees, nothing. Are you telling me, Verizon, that you don't have to charge any tax whatsoever on your FIOS? That here, in Washington, the king of high utility and service taxes (we pay 25% taxes on our cell phone bills here, folks) you're getting a free ride? That Erin, the "oh-no-you-dih-int" service rep from Hell was accidentally right? I find that hard to believe. I think it more likely that you've already fucked up your billing procedure and I'll see some sort of insane charge on my card between now and AUGHAOSHGLJHSLKJGDSLJADSLJK.

Because you're just that retarded.

Update: Comcast Videos

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