long story short people… i’m quite tired… I spent 1200 bucks on a bunch of swords for my sister’s birthdays and christmases for the next two years because the entire brand is going away, and I had to get a bit tiffy with some really rude paypal people… had an extra unexpected guest who arrived about one thirty in the morning (we were already expecting one, so it wasn’t a total surprise…!) and then at about 9:45, my banking center had a bomb threat called in! We spent two hours in the heat watching as AA County cops and bomb squad, AA County Fire Department, and the Federal Department of Homeland Security peoples search the entire banking center before clearing it… (yeah, calling in a bomb threat to a member of the federal reserve brings in the DHS people!) And then to top it off, as a “sales and service specialist” stand-in (until I get my promotion to the SSS position at another banking center) I got hit with all the people walking in the building with the “OMG I saw the cops today!! Were you guys robbed??” which meant that I told the story over and over and over again! This was of course happening while I was playing phone tag with my corporate recruiter working out my final propotion wrinkles, just really small ones like what my salary will be, when I get to move into the new postion, etc. Did i forget to mention the freakishly wierd nightmare I had about a worm/centipedeish creature who was trying to bite me, and whose bites were deadly, which meant at best I started today with only about four hours of sleep?

Its only nine pm, but I will very soon be hitting the sack and bring this day to an end!

Do you dare IM Me?::


about to collapse

What I am going deaf listening to::
Ender’s Shadow Audiobook by Orson Scott Card

Literally, two years… July 19th, 2005, when I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I’ve laid low the past couple of weeks on the internet, have refrained from visiting any website that might possibly leak anything on Harry Potter, and even have picked up other books to read patiently until then. Naturally my choices of books could have been better. Only someone silly like myself would go and start reading Stephen King’s “The Stand” one day before Harry Potter will be in my hands. But given how big a fan Mr. King is of Harry Potter, I think he’ll forgive me. For someone who has never finished one of his books, I strangely find Stephen King fascinating as a reader and literary genius. In his book critiques I’ve read, I’ve fallen for every book he’s lauded, and some of the greatest works he’s claimed as his inspiration I also share in my joy. So, I am determined to finish the book, if nothing else than my list of “unfinished books” is way too long!

I could go on for an hour or more on the events of the past two weeks, but to keep it short, as I’ve got to go to work *bah* I drove to Philadelphia with an AMUN staffer and we went to a Phillies/Cardinals game and went for actual philly cheesesteaks afterwards… the line to get the steaks was longer than getting in the game! But all in all I think the two of us had a lot of fun! This was of course only a few weeks after he also came up to Baltimore to go see the O’s and Yanks play. I’m not a huge fan of baseball, but I’m always up for getting out of the house a little bit. And its interesting to see how the real fanatics react with every pitch… I suppose I must look like that whenever i walk into a bookstore or the DVD section of any electronic store!

While I can’t go into them right now, I have seen the trifecta of summer movies… naturally Harry Potter on the Tuesday night premier, Transformers on the Fourth of July, and Die Hard 4. Gosh I miss going to the movies this often!!! They were all great in their own ways, even if HP was cut in half!!

I’m still patiently waiting for any answer on my work situation, but I am losing hope every day. *sadsigh*

Do you dare IM Me?::


just try to cut in front of me in line!!!

What I am going deaf listening to::
Used To ~ Daughtry

I’m still officially waiting to find out if my promotion at my work has gone through, and so the last week and a half has been stressing and tiring!! I had my interview on wednesday with my potentially new banking center, which went well from what I understand. But now I have to wait for a phone call to tell me whether it is going through or not, and lets just say answering the phones at my banking center is difficult to begin with. First of all, customers who have taken the time and gas to get to the banking center deserve first attention. We cannot simply interrupt an interaction, or hold up the line for a phone call. Secondly, and this is generally speaking: banking centers can’t give out personal information!!! That is what banking by phone is for!! They have tools, such as caller ID and access ID codes that they can use to determine your identity. We don’t have that at our banking center, nor do we have it in any banking center in the area. We can’t verify your pin numbers, we don’t know from which phone you are calling, and we get so much fraud, we can’t truly tell if you are the one calling or not. And for you people who get checks, we can’t verify funds in someone else’s account over the phone or in person!!! Would you like it if I gave your account balance to someone you might or might not have given a check to? What if the person stole your checkbook and needed to find out how much money you had that they could take? What if someone edits your check to clean you out? Banking institutions and credit unions have set procedures set out by Congress and the Federal Reserve on how to process checks and money orders, and believe me it does not begin nor end with the teller. We spend so much time answering phones for questions that common sense dictates we cannot answer that most of the time we simply cannot answer the phone to begin with. So on that rare occassion that we are expecting a phone call for an important matter, it can be sometimes not answered in expectation that it is another person asking for information we cannot give. The recruiter may have called on Friday, but I don’t know about it. I’d tell them to call my cell phone but I can’t answer it at work and they don’t call after hours. Which leaves only my home number, which I am not there to pick up. And I seriously doubt they’d leave all the information with my mom.

Anyways, enough of the rant… I went to the bookstore the other day after seeing Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and I saw a commercial for the upcoming The Golden Compass which is a book by Phillip Pullman and which is now a movie with a huge cast of stars including Nicole Kidman, my current heartthrob Daniel Craig (The New James Bond boys and girls!) and Eva Green (who was Vesper Lynd in the new James Bond!)… and its in my genre Science-fiction/fantasy. Oh yeah, there is no not-liking this movie, and the visuals look simply to die for!!! So I got on the website, and played around a bit, and here is the only thing you could really do quiz-wise, but always fun to do!

Do you dare IM Me?::


nerdy

What I am going deaf listening to::
Empire~ Orson Scott Card (Audiobook)

Well, I should have been in bed hours ago *three as a matter of fact* and I did absolutely nothing I needed to do *like laundry* but I do feel a great sense in accomplishment, even if it is as trivial as working on my blog. *sigh* I am really hoping that the work I am putting into this will put me back in the mood to blog as I used to. Not being on a community site does have its disadvantages. I am much less likely to be read here by random strangers than on LJ. But i have at least made some headway there. I have set up a syndication account on LJ for this blog, Samantha’s Musings on LJ. Friending this account will add everything I put up here onto your friends page. I have also mastered the use of avatars by pasting a simple line of code at the beginning of each code and choosing which one from a graphical display on my write post page, of which at least two hours were dedicated to making this. I wasn’t sure I actually was going to finish it tonight, but I did! Not that anyone else will ever see, but it is a big thing for me from the page I am viewing right now. I’ve also tweaked the last bit I can think of right off the bat, like linking the samanthahowe.net at the top of the menubar to the main page of my website and the ridding of empty space where i didn’t want it. I still have work to do on the sidebar, but in terms of graphic design, I am done, and pleased with it. *sigh* It is now one in the morning… thank goodness I don’t have to be at work until 8:45 (although I’m willing to bet I’ll be there by 8:15).
In terms of work, its been a bit trying this past week, as I was moved from one station to another. The benefit is that now I have a Teller Cash Dispenser at my station, which means that even though I have the highest accuracy in the bank, I don’t have to count down and double count money going out of my drawer as much (which when a customer asks for 50 one dollar bills, it really does help.) The downfall is that the TCD takes up about a third of the station, and so I lose a significant portion of space I was accustomed to, including two drawers and a cabinet, of which I now have none. So, I stayed late on Saturday while the bank was holding a homeownership workshop and rearranged my new station to accomodate the loss of 1/3 of my space and the need to move everything over. According to Laura (my next station neighbor) I am the only one who could have so thoroughly rearranged and organized the station, including completely rearranging the computer there as well. I am a wee bit proud of that as well.
Well, This is it for the evening, as I still have to take a shower before going to bed… but I will not disallow myself the chance to write again if the need arises

Do you dare IM Me?::


accomplished, and sadly, not tired enough for the time…

My television is currently diverting my attention with::
Persuasion~Amanda Root

For those who might not know, i recently became a banker, and I’m beginning my training as a personal banker, beginning with teller duties, as well as studying the products and beginning to learn to sell them. Being a teller is quite different in some respects than all of the other customer-servicy jobs I’ve had (like working at Blockbuster and Books-A-Million). I dealt with money at Blockbuster, but never to the degree I do at my bank… back at Blockbuster, it was a really good weekend for rentals if the store made ten thousand dollars a night. Now ten thousand dollars passes through my hands in a matter of an hour or two. On a busy day, nearly 100,000 dollars can pass through my hands, though, for all you who are thinking of robbing a bank, the money is never there all at once. (And on a further side note, don’t rob banks… thats a crime people!) My bank has been decent to me so far… I’ve now got medical insurance; its a corporation that isn’t likely to crumble in disrepair in the next few years, we always have heat in the winter and AC in the summer, and they are very efficient in their payroll. I was hired on a monday the 13th of February. On Wednesday, the 15th, I recieved my first paycheck for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Two days on the job, and I was paid for three. That is what I call efficient. Plus, they have decent merchandise *merchandising is always a cool necessity* and they have what is called associate banking, where we get all the perks that come with $20 a month fees for free. Now I really have no excuse to say, “Sorry I don’t have the money, I didn’t have a chance to make it to the bank.”
Now, every week, I always get the same group of whiner customers who just don’t understand why they have to show identification to get account information, or withdraw money from their account. Explain to me how you want to endorse a system where someone can come up to the teller window, say I’m Charles Turgeson (being a girl, that’s not too likely, now is it) but because the teller doesn’t ask for identification, she randomly gives me money from someone else’s account. Guess what people :: we ask for identification for YOUR OWN PROTECTION!! I ask for ID to make sure I am giving your money, your hard earned cash, to you and you alone. Is it really that difficult to produce an ID for money? No it is not. And if you don’t carry ID, I sure as hell hope you weren’t the one who pulled up in the gas guzzling Hummer right there in the handicapped parking spot given you don’t have a drivers liscence to prove you can control that beast. If you don’t want to produce ID, withdraw money from the ATM. Oh wait, you don’t carry your bankcard either. Silly me, I thought I could withdraw money from the ATM without anyone knowing who I am. Good thing that camera works then. The ones I love are the customers who quote “I’ve been banking here forty years! Everyone knows me!” Well Guess what, I don’t know you. If you know another teller better, wait for them to help you specifically. We’ve all got our favorites… the dirty old men who love flirting with the gals, the trouble makers who come during our slow period (But they really aren’t troublemakers, but they love how we gals tease them about being one), and the nice old ladies that come in. I’ve got one darling lady who swears she wants to take me to Germany. She waits for me specifically to help her, allowing others to pass through in line. So when I use my discretion not to card her, its because I am confident in who she is and that she’s not getting access to someone else’s money but her own. Some guy today pulled the “i’ve been banking here…” line, and then pointed me out, the newest of the tellers, that I knew who he was. I had no earthly idea who he was!! Guess what, I can name about ten people who come into the bank on nearly a daily basis. I can point out in a crowd maybe an extra sixty people who are constantly in the bank, but I don’t know their names, where they live, or where they work. Chances are, if you are at my window, you are not one of them. I see two hundred people a day, and I know ten total… the odds aren’t in your favor dude.
On a further rant, please people please, fill out your deposit forms correctly!! When it asks for a name and address, provide it! I constantly am amazed at the people who refuse to put their address on the form, so when I put it on for them, they ask me why. Why, I ask? Because its on the form. It asks for it right there, see? Banks aren’t in the mindset of randomly asking people for information. If it were, you would think they would come up with better questions, like what is your pet’s name? your favorite childhood memory? or the last movie that made you sob and cry in the theatre? If its on the deposit ticket, the information is really asked for and needed. Get over it and fill it out, and do it before you come up to the window and hold up the line.
I had a lady today that couldn’t understand why I couldn’t let her deposit other people’s checks into her own account. Well, lets think about this for a moment. As far as I can tell, you could have easily walked from person’s to person’s mailbox and looked through their mail. What a surprise, your paycheck has arrived! Why should the person its written to cash it when the random snooper could do it for you? We have no idea if the person the check has been written to has any clue that there is a check in their name, that they wanted you to have the money, or even signed it with their own hand. But surely no one has committed check fraud ever, right? Is this too farfetched for me, the cynical teller?? Or has my identity theft made me paranoid about another round of theft?

Anyways, what I just said happens every single day. But this week has been particularly horrible. I will not go into the details of what goes on behind the teller lines, lay blame and gossip about my coworkers, but I will be glad when six thirty tomorrow night hits and I actually have the weekend off for a conference retreat. *sigh*

Do you dare IM Me?::
::
annoyed and exhausted, but still having to pack and shower…. *skeevieness*

What I am going deaf listening to::
Say Anything ~ Good Charlotte

What I am enriching my mind with::
Shadow of the Giant ~ Orson Scott Card ~ Ender Saga (Audiobook)