I deposited a check for $450 into my account on Saturday. It cleared on Monday. Then on Tuesday, they put a hold on $350 of that. Then on Wednesday, the hold cleared. Then on Thursday, a check I wrote cleared, leaving $4 in my account this morning. So this afternoon, they decided to put a hold back on the $350 until MAY 29, so my account is now overdrawn by $346.00.

This is why it’s a lot harder than it sounds to just leave Wells Fargo. I need to now go in and make a new deposit to get our balance back above zero. I’d love to just close the account right then, but they’re holding $350 of my money until May 29. I also have automatic deposits going in tomorrow and Tuesday.

Then what’s great is that they charge you $34 for being overdrawn, and then when you complain, they say they’ll remove half of the charges as a courtesy. So they still steal $17 from you.

We’ve been shopping around at different banks, and at least now we know where we want to go when we’re able to make a break.

read about previous Wells Fargo problems…

I was mowing today and saw our yard’s very first garter snake of 2008.

I knew this moment was going to happen sooner or later, and we’re about a month after some people have seen their first snake of the year, but it’s a little disheartening because Sara and I have done so much work to snake-proof the yard. We know there’s going to be no way to truly rid our yard of all snakes, but our ambition has been to make the yard the most undesirable snake habitat it can be.

This has involved major weeding projects, total removal and transplant of flower gardens, and clearing out the cluttered vegetation between our garage and the neighbor’s fence — we filled 10 lawn bags in one day a few weeks ago. Last year, we encountered way more snakes than we would have hoped to, but we didn’t close on the house until the end of April and really weren’t living here full-time until late July. Taking over the home of an old hippie who moved out a year before we even bought the place gave snakes plenty of time to find cozy places to live without the hazard of running into people.

So the whole plan this year was to just get on top of the situation and keep at it so that we never fell behind. Snakes would wake up from their warm boulder of hibernating friends and siblings, crawl out to our lot, and think to themselves, “This isn’t nearly as inviting as I remember it,” and then move on somewhere else (preferably the country).

If there’s any bright spot to today’s sighting, it’s that the snake was very close to the boundary of our property, near a little bush I had yet to destroy (which offered ground cover) and very close to the gap between the garage and the neighbor’s fence. So if he was around in 2007, that would have been very friendly territory. He slithered away into the neighbor’s yard before I could get to him, so I hope he went and told all of his friends how our place has gotten all gentrified and boring.

TheFullPint.com is beer news, reviews and discussion. And it makes me thirsty every time I visit it. The site has reviews of beers from all over, and the forum has discussion on beers, including a section just for home-brewers.

For beer lovers, it is a must-visit.

Some of the stuff goes way over my head, but even with my limited knowledge of the process and the vocabulary of beer crafting, there is plenty on the site that I’ve found useful, and at very least, interesting.

And again, it makes me thirsty.

At the risk of making this just a Consumer Complaint blog, I feel the need to share our recent experience with Nebraska Furniture Mart.

Sara and I were there last Saturday, initially just to help my mom pick out a new digital camera. But while we were there, we wandered over to the outdoor furniture department in the back of Mrs. B’s clearance center. Sara happened to notice a dining room set that was not only beautiful, but a bargain.

So what began as assistance for camera shopping turned into a big purchase day, as we bought this table and six chairs for the dining room and another table and chair set for the kitchen.

Wednesday delivery time came, and when the delivery guys were ready to go, the table was a lot smaller than I remembered it. I checked the picture I took in the store, and it had two leaves that were now missing. The delivery guys didn’t have them. They called in to the dispatch, and they had no idea where they were. The person I spoke with said she would try very hard to find them, and she’d call me back before 9pm. But she told me, as we bought this from the clearance center, we bought it “as is.” I reminded her that though we bought it as is, it wasn’t delivered as we bought it.

Around 8:30, she called back, but it was for the follow-up survey. She didn’t realize that she was calling the person she told several hours earlier that she’d be working hard to find the leaves. When I brought that up again, she was a little flustered and then said they had their best guy working on it for four hours and he couldn’t find them. She said they would be willing to come pick it up AT NO CHARGE TO US and refund us, as if that was some kind of generous offer. Alternately, she said she could knock off $80.

This table is small without the leaves. It’s a little table with six chairs sitting around it. It’s not big enough for a dining room table and it’s not big enough for six chairs. So with $80 taken off, it becomes a too-small table that we’d have to put somewhere else and replace with an actual dining room table, so that option was clearly not going to work. I didn’t want to give up on the table yet, for two reasons: it’s an awesome table and chair set that looks amazing in the dining room, and I had trouble comprehending how they could just lose two table leaves and have no idea where they are. So I asked if we could hold off on the pickup in the hopes that the leaves would turn up.

I called back today asking if there was any sign of the leaves. The customer service representative said that our account was set up for a return, apparently meaning that NFM had already given up on any chance of finding the leaves. I scheduled the return and then asked if there was a manager or supervisor I could speak to. She asked if I could just tell her what I had to say.

I explained that this was very, very frustrating for us. We had already found a home for our old table and chair set and moved them out of the house, so we were now worse off than before we bought the new set. And now I was going to have to take off more time from work to be home for their open-ended day-long delivery system. I explained that this made us not want to shop with Nebraska Furniture Mart, because we have no confidence that we’ll actually get what we order, and we feel pretty screwed over by the whole process. I didn’t raise my voice or cop an attitude in the slightest — just tried to get across how frustrating this whole situation had been.

She closed by saying “Well, I could give you a $50 letter that you could use toward another purchase, but you just said you don’t want to shop here anymore so I guess there’s no point in that.”

What kind of awesome customer service is that?