spugbrap’s blog

In the past, when my checking accounts have been overdrawn, it has been no laughing matter. I’ve been sad, angry, annoyed at myself, annoyed at my bank, etc. Earlier this week, though, I actually had an overdraft occur which made me laugh out loud!

First, a little context (impatient? skip to the funny scenario):

Lacey and I have been using USAA for our home, auto, and life insurance needs since we’ve been married (9 years now!). A few years ago, their banking division, USAA Federal Savings Bank (FSB), offered us a good deal to refinance our van loan, and we did that. We’ve been very happy with all of the USAA services that we’ve used, and have had countless frustrations with Bank of America (BoA), so in June of 2007, I opened checking and savings accounts with USAA FSB. Over the course of a month or two, I switched all my spending and bill payment over to that account. In September of 2007, I closed my BoA checking and savings accounts (the last straw was when BoA started charging me fees for not using my accounts!).

USAA FSB has been wonderful! I do all my deposits via USAA Deposit@Home, using my scanner and their web application. The deposits post to my account immediately. The savings account has a pretty high interest rate (way better than BoA’s), and even the checking account earns interest (way more than BoA’s *savings* account). I earn rewards points using my check card, and there are no minimum balance requirements for any of this.

Another great thing about USAA FSB is that they let you specify two overdraft accounts. I have my checking account set up to draw from my savings account, then from a credit card (issued by another bank, even), in case of non-sufficient funds (NSF). The best part is, there are no fees for the overdraft protection!

We had a charge which would have put the checking account in the negative by twelve cents, a couple months ago, and USAA just quietly grabbed that $0.12 from the savings account, and that was that! I say quietly, but I’m sure I received an email about it. BoA would have charged me $35 for the NSF, then $30 for using the overdraft protection (to transfer the $0.12 from savings).

Now, for the funny scenario that happened this week:

A couple weeks ago, an automatic recurring charge for $101.95 went on my credit card (a BoA/FIA Card Services card, formerly MBNA, Merrill Lynch branded). I scheduled a credit card payment of $101.95 through USAA Web BillPay, to be paid from my USAA checking account. However, my checking account balance was a bit too low, this week. There was not enough to cover that payment, and not quite enough to cover my Verizon phone bill payment.

Here’s a screenshot showing a few transactions (charges and credits) and my account balance:

So, check #354 brought my account balance down to $71.60. My Verizon bill payment was $71.90, so USAA transferred (without charging fees) $0.30 from my savings account, to cover that charge. Remember, BoA would have already charged me $65 at this point.

Now, there was a $0.00 balance and my credit card bill payment for $101.95 needed to go through. My savings account only had a couple dollars in it, so USAA didn’t bother with that. BoA would have transferred the remaining balance from savings, even though it didn’t cover the overdraft, and would have charged me for it. Instead, they transferred (without charging fees) $200 from my secondary overdraft protection account, which happened to be the same credit card! This covered the $101.95, and left the account with a non-zero balance. I assume this was just in case any additional charges come through before I got a chance to add funds to the account.

Summary:

So, the end result is that my checking account transferred funds from my credit card for overdraft protection, to cover the bill payment I was making to that credit card. Later that night, my paycheck direct deposited to the account, so all was well. (Well, actually, the credit card charged me a $6 fee for some reason (they called it “BANK TRANSACTION FEE”). No surprises there, though. BoA finds ways to charge fees for anything they can think of! But $6 was a lot easier to handle than BoA checking account overdraft and NSF fees). I went ahead and made a $206 payment to my credit card, and had a good laugh!

I’m happy with USAA Federal Savings Bank, and highly recommend it for anyone that is eligible. (That’s the only downside of USAA FSB. You have to be eligible for USAA membership to open accounts there. Check membership eligibility requirements here.).

I woke up this morning, turned off my alarm, took my morning wake-up medicines, and got in the shower. About half-way through my shower, I noticed that it was still dark outside. This was odd, because I’ve been noticing sunlight peeking through the edges of the miniblinds during my showers, lately.

Then, it dawned on me–the alarm I had turned off was not my “morning-wake-up” alarm; it was my “middle-of-the-night” (take second Xyrem dose and go back to sleep) alarm.

So, I finished my shower, then puzzled over what to do next. One option was to go back to bed, but I had already taken my wake-up medicines, and did not have any spare doses to take upon reawakening. The other option was to proceed as usual, getting to work freakishly early, but only having had about two hours of sleep. If necessary, I could always take a nap in my car, at some point during the day.

I decided to head to work. When I got there, I realized that if I was going to take a nap in my car, I needed to do it early, because it would be too hot later in the day. So, I found a nice, quiet, shady corner of the parking lot, cracked the windows, set alarms on my cell phone, and attempted to get comfortable.

Unfortunately, my new car is not so good for sleeping in. No matter how I adjusted the seat, at least one part of my body was either cramped or unsupported. After about 45 minutes of trying to get reasonably cozy, I finally found the right combination of seat position, neck support, and foot placement. For neck support, I ended up using my owner’s manual package (it’s inside a zippered soft leather case) wrapped in a towel, with the seat’s headrest up a few notches. About 30 minutes later, my alarm went off, and I went into the office, feeling very much like a zombie. I bought an energy drink from the deli on the way in, which helped a little bit, but really I was pretty zombified all day.

This started out very similar to the last time I got up way too early, but I took a very wrong turn this time (in part due timing factors, like my current prescription wake-up meds running out next week). Last time, I went back to bed after the shower. If this ever happens again, I will be doing that.

It is also worth noting that last time, I woke up insanely early without any external cues, whereas this time I had an alarm go off. I’ve had that middle-of-the-night alarm go off every night for months, though, so why did I handle it wrong this time?

Perhaps it’s because I changed some variables last night, relating to alarms. I’ve been having trouble remembering to actually take my Xyrem when that alarm goes off, more and more lately. I’ve also been crawling back into bed after turning off my morning-wake-up alarm, on several recent occasions.

So, to combat both of these issues, I did two things differently last night:

1. I put my morning-wake-up alarm clock on the floor, on the other side of my nightstand, with the time facing away from the bed. This way, I would be forced to get up to turn it off, and would have to get conscious enough to figure out that it’s facing the wrong way, in order to successfully find the little tiny switch on one side that turns it off.
2. I put my middle-of-the-night alarm (an old cell phone) under a paper towel, inside an open box, with my Xyrem bottle on top of the paper towel, and a sheet of bubble wrap partially covering the top of the box. Really, there’s no way to adequately describe what this looked like, so here are some pictures:

If my alarm clock had been on my nightstand–facing towards the bed–I might have noticed what time it was, when I turned off my middle-of-the-night alarm. If my middle-of-the-night alarm had not been hidden inside the odd little box, the way it was, I might have simply turned it off and gone back to sleep. Even if I didn’t take my second Xyrem dose, at least I would have gotten more sleep.

Tonight, to be on the safe side, I’m going to put things back the way they were. Well, I might go ahead and hide my morning wake-up meds a little bit, so I might think twice before taking them. Really, the thing that would help most with my sleep/wake cycle would be to stop staying up late doing things like finishing blog entries! :)

If you need to clean up cork floors, don’t use Lysol disinfectant spray. I learned this the hard way, and have yet to actually adequately recover from it.

Early one morning, a couple months ago, one of the cats pooped at the top of our stairs, on the cork floor. Since they are not my cats (they are mainly Lacey’s and Matthew’s), I’m not usually the one to clean up such a mess. But everyone was still asleep (I go to work way early), and I didn’t want the mess to get worse by having someone (cat or human) step in it and track it around the house, so I dealt with it myself.

I thought I remembered Lacey telling me that the way she cleaned that stuff up was to pick up the poop with paper towels and dispose of it, then spray the area with Lysol and wipe it off. Well, it turns out, the floors didn’t like that. It turned the sprayed area a light color, and took off the shine. It looked bad.

So, I sprayed some Pledge wood polish on it, and wiped that on, and tried to wipe off the excess. The spot looked better (not perfect, but at least it was shiny again), but now the whole area was very slippery! I wiped and wiped, with paper towels and then with rags, but all it did was make the slippery area bigger. Wood floors are slippery enough, already, and the top of the stairs is a really bad place for floors to be extra slippery!

I needed to get to work, but I didn’t want the kids (or Lacey even!) to slip and fall down the stairs, so I grabbed a bathroom rug (the kind with nonslip rubber on the bottom, that you step on when you get out of the tub/shower), and covered the entire slippery area.

Lacey told me that this is *not* the way she cleans up cat poop, and she proceeded to tell me how she actually does it. But that was a couple months ago, and I’ve already forgotten. Luckily, the cats don’t tend to poop in the wrong place anymore, although their long hair does make the occasional cling-on get dropped here or there, sometimes. Eww.

The rug is still there, today, because I don’t really know what to do about the slippery floor problem, without risking damaging the floor worse than I did originally. I actually kind of like having a soft, non-slip surface up there. It does help me know where the top of the stairs are, when going up/down in the dark. I guess it’s probably kinda tacky, though, but I tend to care more about utility/safety than aesthetics.

The cats like it too. They sleep on it every night!

(Nermel sleeping on it earlier this evening)

We watched the 2-hour finale tonight, which apparently ended about 10 minutes late. We didn’t watch it live, though; we watched it on the tivo, shifted about an hour later. So, when our recording ended abruptly, and they hadn’t even announced the results yet, we were kinda bummed. Apparently, they couldn’t fit everything they wanted into two hours. To reward their viewers, who cast a record number of votes (74 million or so), they didn’t even announce the results until after the show’s scheduled end time. So, anyone who recorded the results show using a Tivo, VCR, etc. did not get to see the results. Thanks, Fox/American Idol!

Incidentally, the winner was Jordin Sparks. I was happy about this, as she was my favorite since fairly early on. Last month, I mentioned that I expected either Jordin or Melinda to win. Blake beating Melinda seemed like a fluke, but his performance with that other beat-boxing rapper guy was pretty entertaining!

One other thing Lacey noticed in the finale show was this message (technically from Coca-Cola, but that was not terribly obvious in this captured frame):

(”Thanks for drinking.”)

“View Minutes”, as it used to be called, has always been a temperamental feature for AT&T Wireless->Cingular->at&t. I won’t go into all the ways that it has sucked over the years, right now, but I should probably address that one day.

For now, I just want to share something interesting that I saw when I tried to view my data plan usage recently. Click the image to see it in context, although the context really doesn’t help much:

That’s awfully far in advance to estimate my data usage! It does make me wonder, though, how my data usage really might be in the year 2020, if the concept of internet usage via cell phone/pda is even relevant by then.

For now, I just hope that Cingular doesn’t screw up the dates when it comes to my *contract*, because I’m pretty sure I didn’t sign a 14-year contract!