So, how was you Memorial day weekend?
Really, that good?
Huh, mine wasn’t so hot, as you can tell by the title of the post.
Want to know what happened that made my holiday weekend suck? Too bad, I’m telling you anyway.
It started out normal enough, the neighborhood pool was opening that Saturday so the girls and Becky decided to go enjoy that for a few hours. To make it even more amusing, they decided to drag me along, I don’t swim so all I do is sit in the shade and sulk while they swim.
When that bit of joy was over we decided to hit up the little carnival/fish fry that a local church was having. I asked if we could please stop somewhere and get me a Mountain Dew, gotta have it! Becky needed gas anyway so we went to one of the local inconvenience marts and tried to get this accomplished. I stayed outside and worked on gassing the car while Becky went in and got sodas. This is where things really started to go wrong!
I usually pay by card at the pump. I slid my card through and after a few seconds it says “invalid card”, what, what the heck does that mean? I try again and still get nothing. I walk into the store where Becky is getting ready to checkout, I inform her of the problem so she goes and tries it with her card while I try and pay for the sodas. No luck, my card won’t work inside either. We leave the building with no sodas and one not so happy daddy. Becky tells me her card won’t work either!
Our bank is just next door so we decide to take a quick drive to their ATM and see what is going on. Well, unfortunately their ATM was out of service, big surprise there. We drive to the next bank over and try to get a withdrawal there only to be informed that we have insufficient funds! What, I made sure the deposit was there Friday, I payed a few bills, but nothing that would drain the bank account.
At this point, I am furious. I tell Becky we should go ahead and go to the carnival/fish fry and try to enjoy it, we can go home and see what happened later. We get to the carnival and it is HOT, boiling hot and they are holding it on their blacktop driveway. I do not enjoy myself, mostly because it is so hot but partly due to the fact that I am fuming over the bank problem. We leave after an hour, since we don’t have money we aren’t getting any fish!
When we get home I head straight for the computer. I go to our bank site and look up our account, what I found darn near made me cry! See one of the bills I paid was to my ex-employer for my COBRA payment. I gave them a check for$185. When I checked my account it showed that the check had been cleared not just once but twice. Once for $185 and once for $10,124.86! Well, my account did not have that much in it, not even close, my fury turned to rage!
I called my ex-employers home number and informed them of what had happened. It appears that when the check was ran it went through alright but the next check they ran went under my account instead of the correct one. Alright, it’s 2:00pm on a Saturday, there’s no one at the bank. As a matter of fact, it’s a holiday weekend, there won’t be anyone there till Tuesday AND I AM BROKE!
So I spent most of my weekend sitting around and fuming over this whole mess. I started in with the phone calls early today and as of this writing everything seems to be back in order, except that my entire weekend was shot!
That does suck!
Now, my question is this; is your ex-employer going to cover the overdraft fees (if any) that their error caused you?
The bank actually took care of the overdraft fees, which surprised me!
My sympathies on the toothache and not being able to do anything. Oh well, it taught me a valuable lesson. From now on I make my COBRA payments in cash!