Bank Dispute Pt 1

There really shouldn’t be any reason for this but I feel that without some transparency over the events which are coming to pass, that my bank isn’t going to pay close attention to the stuff going on. In filing a dispute with my credit card bill I’ve decided to chronicle the entire set of exchanges online until it gets resolved. I’m not doing this for the shits and giggles, let me tell you, but only because the last time I filed something similar it took a threat to cancel all my accounts with them for them to move their asses.

Long story short, dispute with a credit card transaction. This was online and was supposed to have been for a service my dad used on his laptop that was supposed to make it run faster (doubtful, and if you’d seen the man’s rig you’d have your own questions). So, the renewal was supposed to have been charged in 2012. What was it doing in 2o13 you ask? I don’t know either.

So I call it in. Told dad I’d be cancelling the transaction because it really isn’t helping him anyway, and I had the guy file a dispute ticket. Did you know that banks here in the PH have to still give you a paper form to fill out to get these disputes processed? Imagine! I’ll still need to fill in a form and bloody send it in via fax and crap.

Hell no. I’m going to do this online.

…and the damn website still asks me to fax the bloody thing.

Okay, let’s let the rep finish his spiels. I’m apparently going to get a letter tomorrow about the dispute and I need to send it in. I was thinking, wow, these guys sure are dedicated, doing this on a weekend (okay maybe I made another threat of cancellation but seriously, those people act like you have to have a gun to their collective heads before they hustle).

So I go ahead and ask the guy “so, you’re telling me that you guys will send a letter one a weekend and have me fill it in on a Saturday?”

“Um….let me put you on hold for a minute while I check with if we have any email bankers available first.”

Well, for all I know there might have been one. Three guesses what happened next?

I get the docs Monday.

Now, the plan is this:

1. Grab the docs.
2. Fill in docs and submit it by hand to the bank branch over in McKinley.
3. Again pester the soon to be harrangued customer service person over the counter
4. Follow it up with another call when I get home.

Sadly there’s still no assurance this will be done according to my satisfaction, but then working in customer service yourself sometimes makes you even more aware of the standards people in that line of work should be considering.

In any case, the conversation over the phone happened 7:36PM according to my laptop computer (Manila Standard Time, that’s GMT+8), so in the interest of making sure I can track this entire thing all the posts re: this situation will be marked with a date and time stamp.

Good luck bank guys.

 

The Glove

I’d not posted anything about art so I figured I’d have a change of pace here. Now, I’d been drawing ever since I realized the back pages of my math notebooks make for great doodle areas (hereby explaining why I suck so much at the subject) and there’s this constant little problem I have where  a lot of smudges on the edge of my hand. Any artist who’s worked with graphite, charcoal, or pastels would probably be familiar with this little problem, seeing as the human hand secretes small amounts of oil (the same stuff CSI uses to get fingerprints) and or sweat any time you draw. Any fluid+any dry media usually means smudging.

I figure I’d eventually develop a drawing style where my hand never touches the paper.

Until I saw this video:

Caramoan Adventure – Climbing to the Grotto

For those I haven’t told yet, I spent most of the weekend over in Caramoan, Camarines Sur. It was my sister Jeannie’s idea really, coming out of a quick conversation on Skype back in December. There were 11 of us there, mostly Jeannie’s friends and the bf. If the name Caramoan sounds familiar to you, it’s prolly because you managed to follow a popular reality show at least in the last few months.

Open Letter to Smart Bro aka Smart Bro’s Moment of Epic Fail

Hi Smart Bro,

I’m not even sure this will even get to you, but I’ll try all the same. My family’s been subscribing to your broadband service since 2006. The first few years were great, fast, if not obscenely fast connections, no data caps (that I know of), no supplementary programs to install other than the ones built into the OS (and in our house, that’s Win7 and WinVista).

But all of that changed, when the Fire Nation attacked.

And me without an army of equalists.

On 13 February I’d been invited to a small bazaar called “Made with Love” by Yani, another blogger over at the LRI Design Plaza over in Bel-Air, Makati. It was a Valentine-themed event that pretty much features a lot of hand crafted stuff made by enterprising arts and crafts people, most of whom seem to be regulars in the bazaar scene.

Overdose of estrogen aside, a lot of nice stuff in the event. Sadly, as I’d forgotten to bring my bitchin’ camera, I’d had to make do with the 2MP camera from my Samsung dumbphone.

Art Class First Output

Ok, so after 4 sessions I managed to finally make something I can post. The techniques the instructor was giving me weren’t really the traditional charcoal pencil/stick on paper. It’s charcoal dust on brushes. Basically the technique holds that you can have a lot more control on your art with basic graphite outlines and a lot of charcoal dust applied through layers and layers of black.

Art Classes: To Sign up or Not to Sign Up?

I guess an update is in order. In a previous post I mentioned being interested in furthering my art education, so I went around trying to find places that offer an art class.

It was around Christmas day that I found a small art gallery near a tea shop in Festival Mall. They had flyers on a few art classes a lot of people seem to like going to. There’s even a judge there who’s like 2x my age, the gallery guy said.

I thought to myself, ok, not bad. Eight sessions under 10K pesos. This could work. I could probably go for pastels, then oil painting, and get some experience in with media I never seriously worked with.

Then I realized I might need more options than one gallery. I had a friend who has contacts with the Artists Association of the Philippines, which is based in Manila. It’s a bit of a commute, but the guys over there have ways to sell whatever artwork you make, minus their commission. Okay, so that’s option 2. Either I go for the easy commute, but likely big budget classes or we go for a longer commute but possibly get more exposure.

So I let the holidays go, thinking I could just go and decide once and for all when New Years is over.  I actually stopped by the mall again for an unrelated reason (needed to get some new batteries for a pair of wristwatches I had lying around I never really use) when I found this little kiosk close to the Francis Magalona store.

Lo and behold, what amounts to 4 months (weekends only) of classes, just under 5K.

Needless to say I’m signing up next weekend.(“,)

Bucket List

With the end of 2012 mere hours away I figure I should take into account some of the things I’d eventually like to accomplish by the end of 2013. It’s probably going to end up more like a guideline of sorts, but I will be checking back on this list every now and then at different parts of the year.

Hopefully this won’t be as big a waste of time as the last one.

You keep using that word….

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means – Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

I’ve come to understand that some elements of language lose context whenever enough people use them in said wrong contexts. From an evolutionary perspective, this also helps shape the form of language into alternative meanings, like in the instance of industry-specific jargon becoming popular slang or in creating new idiomatic expressions that in no way resemble their original meanings. Now, I’m no linguist myself, so indulge me in this little diatribe if only for a few minutes.

Revisiting Charcoal

This week I’d decided to go back to a long-neglected artistic media: charcoal. I hadn’t picked up a stick of the stuff for months and I’d wanted to see how much I’d missed out on by not practicing.

Turns out, not so much.

I still have some problems when it comes to detailing but for some reason a lot of the strokes I do now have a lot more control to them. Odd, that. Maybe the time I spent not drawing I spent visualizing?

No, that’d be stupid. 

Still, there’s something to be said about a greater amount of control. I’ll just have to keep skritching away on the sketchpad to see where this goes.