Woxidu

Money

I’m a poor college student. I charged a $1.50 PATH train ride to my PNC debit card two days ago and accidentally overdrew my checking account by $0.30. I still had $0.60 in my savings account, but I was charged $34.00 in overdraft fees anyway. I tried to transfer the money into the checking account online to cover the overdraft, but couldn’t because the online banking software doesn’t allow transfers of amounts less than $1.00. Evidently, transfers of this scale cannot be made over the phone either. The only way to make such a transfer is to go to an actual PNC branch and talk to a real-live-person. I could also have gotten what’s called “Overdraft Protection.” This is a service whereby money in some account A can be used to cover an overdraft in some account B. Perfect… right?

No, to make matters worse, Overdraft Protection would only have worked if the surplus account, A, had $50.00 or more in it. And in the end, I couldn’t have transfered the money in-person because there are no PNC branches in New York City! The only way I could have possibly gotten the money transfered would have been if I had gone to Exchange Place, in New Jersey, and asked for the transfer in person. What’s the only way to get to New Jersey from NYC without a car? You guessed it! The PATH train!

So why do banks operate this way? I had the money I wanted to use, they just had it organized in a way that made them think I didn’t. The way I see it, they had two options: one courteous and one childish and greedy. It’s not really so surprising that a bank would take the greedy approach, but it makes me lose much respect for them. The representative I spoke with over the phone was unsympathetic and a bit terse about it. I had hoped they were more interested in sensibility and customer satisfaction. At the end of the day, I’m out $34 for a $0.30 overdraft because nobody at PNC felt like my business was worth it. I walk away a bit happier about the fact that my PNC account will be closed in three months.

In the computer world, sadly, I only have more bad news. I found and reported a bug in OS X’s Terminal.app yesterday. It’s only triggered when two tiny stars align, but it’s effect is kind of nerve-racking. The stars the must align are the following:

• Open a shell script using Terminal.app (Apple+Option drag the file over Terminal.app, set to open with Terminal by default, etc)
• While that shell is executing open its Terminal Window Settings and click “Use Settings as Default” (you don’t even need to change any of them).

After doing this, all new Terminal windows will run that script and then exit, preventing you from actually using a shell (unless you do something inane like making a shell script that runs bash)! You then have to use something like Apple’s Property List Editor to delete the value for the key “ExecuteString” in order to have a usable Terminal program again. Yikes!