Posts Tagged ‘Home Life’

I just got a call from American Express regarding my Blue for Business card. It seemed innocent at first. They said since I was such a loyal customer and since I’ve never missed a payment and have always paid more than the minimum (actually almost double the minimum) that they were going to give me a special offer. If I were to pay say $12,000 of my balance they’d give me $648, 5.4% towards my balance. Great incentive really considering I was planning on paying off my complete balance in June anyway.

But here’s the kicker. First they already dropped my credit limit from $22,000 to $15,400. The cheeky fuckers raised my interest rate from their supposed lowest possible rate 11.99% in Feb to more than double that. A hot rate of 27.22% in March.

So I’ve just been charged double the interest for the past two months and will be for this month and the next. Essentially they’re just crediting me my own bloody interest back. Seriously, WTF.

The real kicker here comes from using NewCreditRules.com’s Interest and Payoff Calculator. I normally pay about $750/mo towards my current balance of $13880.

Before:
Making payments of $750 on a balance of $13880 would take you 21 months to pay off with a 12% APR.
Total interest paid is $1546.20 ($15426.20 total paid).

After:
Making payments of $750 on a balance of $13880 would take you 25 months to pay off with a 27.2% APR.
Total interest paid is $4319.48 ($18199.48 total paid).

Some loyalty, the only reason why I’m paying anything right now is because I did a balance transfer from my two other cards to consolidate payments. I’ve been a customer for 7 years and am currently a share holder, not to mention my credit score of 823. Nice doing business with you too, asses.

UPDATE: It gets better. I just called to find out why my rates were doubled. It turns out they decided to put me to the default rates after I accidentally made a payment against my WaMu checking account which was closed a day prior. I actually noticed this immediately after making the payment and called them. I tried to have that payment cancelled as I added my Fidelity account and wanted to make an immediate payment from that account. I also wanted to make sure this didn’t mess up my rates, charge me a return payment fee, and more importantly not screw up my score. I was assured that everything would be fine, and got the $38 charge reversed and was assured that my rate and score would be fine.

03/13/2009*     Credit Adjustment for Returned Payment Fee      -38.00
03/09/2009*     FEE FOR RETURNED PAYMENT FEE FOR RETURNED ELECTRONIC TRANSACTION     38.00
03/09/2009*     RETURNED CHECK/DECLINED BANK TRANSACTIONS     500.00
03/06/2009*     COMPUTER PAYMENT RECEIVED – THANK    -500.00
03/05/2009*     COMPUTER PAYMENT RECEIVED – THANK    -500.00  

This was all noted on my account and to top it off my payment wasn’t even due till the 20th of March anyway. My minimum due was less than $500 to boot.

I told the first customer service person that this was ridiculous and she said “sir, it’s actually worse to have a returned payment than a late one”. I just said… interesting, could you please escalate this. American Express will lose my business and all further interest from my account unless the rate increase is reversed.

I was transferred to a supervisor (Chris x23468 – he was nice and only doing his job but reading from a script no doubt). He basically said the same thing, it wasn’t American Express’ mistake and despite the fact I called up within 10 minutes of noticing the error and corrected it, and despite the fact that they even reversed the fees they couldn’t reverse the rate increase. I said I’d be sending this all to the CEO of American Express, Consumerist, and NewCreditRule’s.

I also have an American Express Clear card, but guess what, despite making the same payment mistake my rates are still at 8.89% on that card. Talk about complete idiocy.

It’s amazing how they’d be willing to lose a few thousand dollars in interest, an excellent and very loyal customer of over 7 years, plus some additional negative publicity over something like this. At this point I’ll be taking them up on that 5.4% credit offer, paying them off completely and never using them again if possible. I won’t close the accounts since it’ll probably do my FICO no good, but oh well. I’ll just be the customer they hate, the type that earns them no interest, the type to use Visa, it’s accepted absolutely everywhere anyway.

But what else is new, everyone already knows the credit industry is fucked up. Oh and in case you didn’t already know, American Express profits are down 56%.

UPDATE: I decided to call American Express once more this morning on my way into work. I explained the entire thing again… This time around I spoke with an Ilene out of Hillsboro, NC. She was very empathetic and realized how I’ve almost always paid double and never been late, plus the rest of the documented history of how I called to try and correct the payment snafu 10 minutes after it happened. At first she said there wasn’t really anything she could do. For some reason after a short wait this changed to her dropping me from 27.22% to 13.99%, a little closer to my original rate of 11.99%. Still I’m a bit miffed since this there’s really no reason for this. I’m still out the extra $350~ in extra interest charges for the past two months as well. Plus this tells me that:

1. The two people last night lied to me.
2. The two people last night were just being lame and just didn’t care.
3. The two people last night weren’t very well trained.
4. All of the above.

My advice to American Express, listen to Barry Schwartz’s TED talk and stop screwing your loyal customers. Kudos to Ilene for trying, I appreciate it.

UPDATE: Logged into Amex’s website to verify the rates and all that. Looks like the jerks dropped my limit on the Clear card a couple grand to within $117 of my current balance. Thanks for screwing with my credit score once again Amex.

Hopefully no one actually noticed any down time. But the migration to the new array has so far gone smoothly and this is just a quick test to make sure the MySQL DB can continue to be written correctly and so on. I’m pretty sure the DB and IIS stuff is fine though, the paths haven’t changed.

Yay, more space.

I’m honestly a bit surprised that the time has already come but sure enough I’ve run out of space on my home server which hosts this blog. I did have 8 * 500GB Seagate 7200.10’s in a RAID5 configuration formatted for a total of 3.17TB of space. I can’t remember when I actually first got the volume set up and everything moved so I don’t really have a good idea of the average amount of new data per day. Regardless as of this moment I have 4.8GB free.

UPS just delivered the 4 * 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11’s today and I’m busily using robocopy to mirror all the data onto 1 of the 1.5TB drives and 1 spare 1.5TB I had spare. The scary thing is that the music content is over 600GB and the video content is over 1.2TB.

My plan is to hold the migrated data on the two separate drives and create the new RAID5 array with 3 drives then move the IIS data and the rest of the data back. Then adding the 4th 1.5TB to expand the entire set out to 6TB total, total amount of space should be 4.5TB or about 4.08TB formatted with NTFS. The extra .91TB of space should hopefully last long enough for me to be able to add 4 more 1.5TB drives next year.

Here’s hoping for a data loss free transition and little down time tomorrow while I create the new RAID volume. And here’s hoping I don’t use up the new drives as quickly not to mention have any issues with 7200.11 firmware .

Yesterday Morning I woke up around 7:30 or so and go ready for work. Erica woke up as I was about to leave. She reminded me, that I forgot to remind her, that I wouldn’t be able to carpool her in to work. Instead she’d have to take the bus in. Not wanting to get out of a warm bed she went right for the iPhone sitting on the side table. She popped open Safari and went to King County Metro’s bus schedule to find her bus time. I got done brushing my teeth and noticed what was up.

Still wanting to beat the West Seattle Bridge to 5 north to 90 east traffic I just showed her instead how to use Google Maps on the phone. Quickly set the starting point as the current location, the end to her salon on California Ave. Swapping the directions to public transit, it showed the bus she’d normally take first thing. Then hitting the load more times showed all the times for the morning and the best time for her to catch the bus to arrive at work by 9:45.

Awesome, just awesome.

I placed my first order from Amazon Fresh last night at 5:23pm, and this morning at 2AM I got an email saying it was on its way. At 9AM when I got up and opened the door there were four totes sitting right on my porch… Two green, two yellow. Awesome!!!

Though when I brought the totes in I realized something, they weren’t heavy at all and I barely ordered anything so why was I bringing in 4 totes? Well turns out Amazon is really paranoid about hurting any of your goods. I only ordered 8 items in this shipment with a total of $33.88 yet they managed to bring it all in 4 totes. One contained a foam core with two dry ice packs inside, this tote contained my frozen fake meat and frozen veg. Then another contained an ice pack inside this keep temp bag, that contained my tikka masala sauce, cucumber, and red leaf lettuce. Then the dry containers contained a bag of chips and a 12 pack of ginger ale respectively.

Totally insane… Everything was in plastic bags, 5 in total. Oh and the chips were by themselves in a paper bag inside a tote. I don’t get it, how is this environmentally friendly and more importantly to Amazon how is this economical for them? The items I purchased were all at the normal cost I buy stuff at in a QFC, Safeway, or Metropolitan Market… so how is this profitable for Amazon?

I understand they don’t want my bag of chips getting crushed by the Canada Dry but surely they could just use some divider thing to keep things in place. 4 totes seems insane for 8 items. If I were going to metro market I would’ve fit all of these things into a single reusable bag and carried the ginger ale in another hand.

Anyway, overall I’m really impressed, they delivered the next morning without me even hearing them and they have things that normally would require multiple trips to actually find and pick up. Oh and I special ordered some matcha green tea powder which is also shipping free in a separate order, I’ve not been able to find this stuff anywhere so that was pretty sweet as well. The lettuce and cucumber seem better than any of the crappy stuff I’d find at Safeway and is on par with the produce from Whole Foods.

So for people in the right zip code, I really don’t see a reason not to use Amazon Fresh. I guess just use it while it still exists since I’m really curious how on Earth they actually make money.