Dom Pannell's Blog

FreeRice

I rather like this little time-waster - you can improve your vocabulary while donating rice to be distributed by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).

According to the site, learning new vocabulary has tremendous benefits. It can help you:

* Formulate your ideas better
* Write better papers, emails and business letters
* Speak more precisely and persuasively
* Comprehend more of what you read
* Read faster because you comprehend better
* Get better grades in high school, college and graduate school
* Score higher on tests like the SAT, GRE, LSAT and GMAT
* Perform better at job interviews and conferences
* Sell yourself, your services, and your products better
* Be more effective and successful at your job

So there.

Hat tip to Bood for pointing me to FreeRice.

Banking Woes 1: Capital One

Actually, this isn't the first time I've griped about British banking. I still haven't gotten round to documenting the fun I had with Drummonds, but I did mention that I was left high and dry in Stockholm last year when Capital One decided to block my funds.

Anyhoo... Capital One are at it again. The root of the problem is my fault: being the lazy bones that I am, I didn't get round to processing my expenses from recent work trips and last week British Airways charged me for the extra ticket I had to buy when I was coming back from Mumbai (no, I haven't sorted that out yet...). Net result? I went over my credit limit on my Capital One Mastercard.

Realising my mistake, I popped into my bank branch and made a payment to my Mastercard. Job done, I thought.

Well, no, actually. A couple of days later, I tried to pay for a meal with my card - the transaction was refused. Oh well, I thought, perhaps it's taking some time for the money to arrive. I paid in cash and then checked my balance online at capitalone.co.uk - apparently the money had arrived the day before and Capital One had thanked me for making the payment. They'd also charged me twice for having gone over my credit limit (thanks BA!). I gave them a call and a nice gentleman in Bangalore told me that it would take a couple of days for the money to become active. He assured me that I would only be charged once though.

That was three days ago.

Last night, my card was not authorized when I tried to pay for some drinks with Bood. Oh well, I thought, it's a bank holiday, so I'll leave it until tomorrow.

Then today Amazon emailed me to say that I need to sort out the payment on a recent book order, because my card had been refused. So I picked up the blower again.

"The reason that you can't use the card is that the payment will take up to nine working days to go through" said the nice Indian lady on the other end of the phone. NINE DAYS?? That's outrageous. The money is coming from an account with Barclays in the UK, not from my back pocket or from some shady back street in Lagos. How can it take nine days to sort out?

"It's because it's a large sum" explained the lady. But how can this be the case? A couple of years ago I had a similar problem with Capital One - at the time I had just paid three thousand pounds in cash into my account because I needed to hire a van to drive to Paris and pick up a wardrobe (it's a long story... let's not get distracted here) but the money hadn't gone through a week later. On that occasion, a friend who was accompanying me had to use his credit card. I had a long conversation with Capital One when I got back and they explained that the hiccup had been caused by my putting a large amount of cash onto the account. I learned that making electronic payments of £2000 or less would avoid such delays. Well, it seems something has changed.

NINE BLIMMIN' DAYS!

What are they doing? Counting the money in pennies? Obviously not, as it was an electronic payment that I have made numerous times over the past couple of years. It can only be a ruse to earn interest, which is one of several scams that British banks have been criticised for time and time again (remember the Cruickshank Report in 2000?).

So, thanks to Capital One, I'm broke for the next week or so.

[EDIT: I've had an official response/apology back from C1 explaining why my card was still blocked two days ago. Apparently "Your transactions were declined as your transactions were referred for manual authorisation as you have paid extra money to your account."

So, let me get this straight. If I put extra money into my bank via an automated interbank system, Capital One will refer it for manual authorisation...!?!?!/EDIT]

Goodbye Charles

I just heard that you left us a few weeks ago. That explains why my emails bounced and your phone numbers weren't working.

I can't say I knew you really well, but I learned to like you a lot over the years that we worked together at COC and that counts for something.

The world is a sadder place because you've gone, Mr K-H. I hope you're in a better place now.