Day in the Life

GUESS what! I managed to pilot that behemoth of a rental car for two whole days IN traffic AND parking in scary-ass, claustrophobia inducing parking garages and I did it without colliding with other cars, giant concrete stanchions, people, buses or other, immovable objects. Yea me!

During my coupla days of buzzing around I found one pretty amazing thing. Halloween knickknacks, novelties and candy are in stores ALREADY. For Bast’s sake it’s barely mid-August! Can we just be here now a little bit? Maybe just until the kiddles are back in school? Pleaze?

Yesterday, in Pier 1, while I was capturing this tableau of MUST HAVE //snort// stemware and mugs, an officious clerk came over telling me to put my camera away. What? Why? I didn’t bother to ask Mister Up Himself about the policy, I Googled instead.

So that people who work for competitors stores don't steal any ideas or products off of the original market.

This is a bunch of mass produced crap, displayed in a standard, unimaginative way. It’s not as though there’s anything unique or special going on.

And then I stopped at my usual grocery, Stop & Shop and found an entire wall of Halloween candy. Jesus Christ on a bed of candy corn!

While there I stopped by the Citizen’s Bank outlet. When did bank’s start having branches within grocery stores? Cool deal for us suburbanites who have to drive (or board multiple buses/trains) to run errands.

My brandy new credit card wasn’t working and I needed to get that sorted. The lovely and friendly teller said

'You have to call to activate it.'
'No can do, I replied. Deaf here. Me and the phone aren’t friends.'  

She hooked me up with the assistant branch manager who could, I assumed, help me more—get things squared away. Ah, not so much. He made a phone call and then pronounced, you have to call to activate it. Deja Vu! (just FYI and shit, in the past, in order to activate a card, all I had to do was use it. I’ve not had to call.)

I gave him the same I'm deaf response that I gave the nice teller lady. That seemed to stump him. I asked if he could activate the card for me. He got back on the blower. While on hold with, presumably, some central office that could put things to right, he was playing on his cell phone and, at the same time, buzzing around some site on his computer. Yup, the gent was not terribly focused. Given this, I shouldn't have been surprised when he came back to me with You have to call to activate the card. Yup, he did.

I told him to cancel my card. He was unable to do that. Of course.

I walked out figuring I’d try to sort things out on line. If that didn’t bear fruit, I’d go to another branch.  At home, I connected to the Citizen’s Bank site and was immediately able to activate my card! This isn’t the first time I’ve run into incompetent, attitude assholes at Citizens but it will be the last. It would seem that Citizen’s doesn’t invest in training their bricks and mortar employees. Not too bright of them. Nope, none too nimble brained at all.

Later, at home, while The Amazing Bob endeavored to read the Globe, I kvetched about this incompetent putz. TAB handed me the front page.

Citizens fined for profiting from depositors’ mistakes
No doubt a bank teller would alert you if a $20 bill accidently fell from your pocket during a branch visit. Would your bank do the same if you made a similar mistake on a deposit slip? Not if you have been banking at Citizens.

For years, the Providence-based Citizens Financial Group Inc. pocketed errors like that and shorted hundreds of thousands of individual customers out of nearly $12.3 million that was rightly theirs.

Huh, so the bank’s not only riddled with untrained, dim bulbed employees, it’s helmed by a bunch of heinously avaricious plutocrats. Got it. I’ll check my credit union—get a card through them.
Day in the Life—The Beatles