…the book is available!

“I’m All Boy and That’s a Fact,” the book I recently illustrated for Lincoln author Katie Theisen, is available from Trafford Publishing’s website.

It’ll still be a few weeks to months before it’s available via places like Amazon and Borders, but Katie’s been steadily working with Trafford to get this thing out and it’s finally available for order. It’s kind of frustrating that it takes so long – definitely moreso on her end because she’s doing all the work – but I’m sure that frustration will go away when I can finally hold a hard copy.

If it had just been happening to us, I’d say it could be attributed to poor bookkeeping. But several Wells Fargo customers I’ve talked to recently have told me the same thing — they’ve started holding deposits for several days, often as long as a week, waiting until you have enough charges to overdraw your previous balance so they can charge you $34 overdraft fees.

For example, let’s say on Monday, you have $200 in your account, but then you deposit $500 that afternoon. They’ll wait until after $200 worth of checks have gone through, charge you the $34 overdraft fee, and THEN let the $500 go into your account.

I used to always make my deposits in person until a teller recommended using the ATM. When you deposit in person, she said, it can take several days for the money to show up in your account. When you deposit at an ATM, it goes in immediately.

That’s clearly not the case anymore. What is also no longer the case is that you have until 5pm to bring your account positive.

My wife and I both have individual accounts and then we share a joint account. Both of us just use our individual accounts for little things. For example, I use mine mainly for comic books and trips to McDonald’s. When we set up our joint account, our banker made it very clear to us that we could monitor our personal accounts online, and if we ever saw an account slip under zero, as long as we caught it that same day, we could transfer funds from our joint account (where our paychecks go, for example) before 5pm and all would be well.

That too is clearly no longer the case. We’ve now discovered that, even though these fund transfer transactions occur entirely within Wells Fargo’s online computer system, they too are now held in “pending” status for several days. And forget that 5pm rule.

I went into one of the locations to complain about things that were happening to my account. By my records, I had always maintained a positive balance in my account, yet through Wells Fargo’s tricky timing, they were able to pull out five separate $34 overdraft charges for an account that my personal records had shown was never overdrawn.

I recently had a situation in which I had a deposit for $250 go in on a Thursday afternoon. It was said to be “pending.” I also made three purchases that day. The transactions exceeded the amount that had been in my account before the deposit, but they did not exceed the amount that showed on my available balance through Wells Fargo’s online banking.

So what happened? Well, they let the charges go through, but then they credited me for the deposit. When I checked my balance on Friday, I showed that I was still positive $50. So that afternoon, I bought lunch and got gas, which totaled about $20.

Well here’s where it got fun. Since they don’t apply their overdraft charges until the next day, they hit me for three $34 overdraft fees, which they applied back in time to Thursday’s transactions. I’m sure you can see where this is going — by applying this $102 to Thursday’s business, all of a sudden I was overdrawn all Friday long, even though my personal records and Wells Fargo’s online banking showed that I had been positive the whole time.

So, since according to their records, I was overdrawn all Friday, I got hit with two more $34 overdraft fees for those two purchases that didn’t total more than $20, which I again made while Wells Fargo showed I had an available balance exceeding $50.

This is just one example of how they’ve screwed us over. My wife recently made a $900 deposit to our account on a Friday and I made a separate $500 to my personal account, and in addition to the money that was already in our accounts, she felt it was safe to make a $250 car payment considering we had more than $2000 in our accounts.

So what did Wells Fargo do? They held her $900 deposit in the joint account for five days. When we saw that money wasn’t being released, I tried to transfer money to her account to cover it. They held that transfer — which again takes place through their computer system — as pending, just long enough so that there wasn’t money in the account. More than $2000 in the accounts, and she got hit with a $34 overdraft fee because they literally stopped the money from going to where it needed to be.

I don’t know if this is a Wells Fargo money making scheme, but they’ve taken several hundreds of dollars from us in the past few weeks in overdraft fees. The banker I spoke to snottily said to me, “Well if you just kept track of your spending in a register, you wouldn’t have this problem.”

That is completely, 100% not true. Keeping track of it in a register would show that we have stayed in the black. My checkbook register doesn’t have a way to log the manipulation of the timing of releases of funds and holding in-house money transfers that were sold to the customers as being instantaneous. That has been the key to Wells Fargo taking more than $500 from us over the past few weeks, $34 at a time.

UPDATE!!
My wife went in to contest the latest fee, when we had more than enough money to cover the car payment, they just wouldn’t clear the deposit nor would they clear in-house transfered money.

The clerk waived the $34 as a “courtesy,” but insisted that the bank did nothing wrong. This clerk told my wife that even if she keeps track of her withdrawals and deposits in her register, she needs to monitor her online account. This is in direct opposition to what a clerk told me a few days ago — that online banking can be wrong and outdated and the bank is not responsible for any erroneous or misleading information, because ultimately you need to keep a register and rely on that.

The woman also told my wife that each individual branch has different policies when it comes to how long they will hold a check and when they will apply fees, deposits and withdrawals.

My wife asked “Is there some kind of a guide so that customers know when they can use the money they’ve deposited with you?”

The lady laughed, as if the question were a joke.

Link from YouSendIt

“Six Geese A’Laying” was the Residential Goosing Christmas album, recorded in late 1999 in the underground rehearsal spaces in the Haymarket that no longer exist.

At the time, my fellow former-Goose Mike Fass and I were in King Jellyfish, so we already had all of our equipment in one location that would allow for the band to re-unite (we’d been broken up since 1996) for this Christmas album.

Unfortunately, a big winter storm hit and nobody wanted to be out on the roads. Mike and I were just figuring it would be doomed, since one of our fellow Geese could make it, when we had a change of heart and thought “No – we will not let a winter storm ruin Christmas.” So we did it ourselves.

With only two people to play all the instruments, and without the fancy digital 8-track that one of our bandmates was going to bring down from Omaha, we had only my old Tascam analog 4-track (which only allowed two tracks to be recorded at a time). That meant that we’d record one track at a time, typically with both of us recording live to that same track. We recorded four tracks of music, bounced that down to two tracks to keep it in stereo, and then used the remaining two tracks for vocals.

Neither of us considered ourselves to be much for singers, so being able to do two tracks of vocals piled on top of each other allowed us to kind of mask our bad singing under more bad singing, but it also put four voices on the tape, which kind of made up for our missing bandmates.

It’s only December 1, but remember – it’s a YouSendIt download, so it’s only available for one week or the first 100 downloads!

I was trying to get in touch with my editor at the paper about payment, but it was just after 5pm on a Friday. Not only that, but he was leaving town for a trip. I went downtown to try to go to the office to see if he was still there, but on the way, I passed by a house where a girl was mowing in the front yard. She recognized me, though I didn’t recognize her, and she told me that my editor was working late and that he would call me.

So I proceeded downtown and went to Jimmy John’s to wait it out. While I was there, I was thinking about how I really wanted to get a bike to save on car expenses. Conveniently enough, Jimmy John’s was also selling horses, and I bought one for $12.20.

While I was in there, a group of high schoolers dressed for prom came in to get sandwiches. All of the girls were wearing dresses of the same color of blue, although the dress styles varied. One of them suggested that the Jimmy John’s staff open a restaurant in South Africa.

It was shortly after this that I decided to leave. My mom was waiting on me to call her back about what I learned from my editor – which was nothing – but I had to get somewhere with good cell phone reception to call her. I got on my new horse and started riding toward my apartment. It was icy out, and the horse was slow to adjust to the skidding, so we bumped into a few cars but made it home safely.

My horse and I got to my apartment and I brought it inside. I explained to my roommates that it wasn’t going to live there, but I needed to find a place to keep it. I got distracted with some discussion about fig newtons versus strawberry newtons, and if I was eating my own or one of my roommates’ newtons, when I realized that my horse had gone missing. It had wandered into one of my roommates’ bedrooms and hidden in the closet. I quickly looked around for it, but I realized that my sudden movements were frightening the horse.

At this point I decided I should read the instructional labels that were attached around the horse’s head. One of them made special note that I should not say anything about “A Brave Knight” or it could upset the horse. I took it out on the balcony to get some fresh air and finally placed the call to my mom that I hadn’t gotten the money from the paper, but I did buy a horse.

She freaked out temporarily until I told her the horse was only $12, and that my main concern now was to find a place to keep it. I wanted to ride the horse out to the north part of town and see if the place where my grandpa used to keep his horses was still open.

Then my friend Andrew came out onto the balcony and was telling us that this horse could easily jump down to the ground. He went on to explain that he had been to some rodeo camp where he learned all kind of horse tricks. He got on the horse, leaped from the balcony, and took it out to the corral next door. Suddenly there were two other guys on horses that I didn’t recognize before, and Andrew started roping them and dragging them to the ground.

I then spent the rest of the dream at some large place with numerous customer service counters trying to sort through the yellow pages to find a place to keep my horse. The people working at the counter refused to acknowledge how their yellow pages books completely lacked any organization whatsoever and it was a nightmare trying to find anything.

I was listening to Power 106.9 this morning in my car as they talked about rapper T.I getting busted for an attempted purchase of illegal machine guns over the weekend.

Now North Omaha is currently struggling with a lot of violence, and community leaders are trying to rise up to motivate people to cooperate with police to bring an end to the “no snitching” attitude to help stop the shootings and killings.

So how do these local DJs with the power of the airwaves respond to the T.I. news?

Well, they call the bodyguard that ratted him out a “punk” for cooperating with the FBI, and they criticize T.I. not for attempting to purchase a bunch of illegal machine guns, but for being stupid enough to trust someone that he’d only known for a few months to be his bodyguard.

If Tom Osborne supports Jon Bruning for Senate, is it safe to assume that Mike Johanns is allied with Bill Callahan and Steve Pederson?

EWWWW!!!

Tonight was full of surprises. The first and most significant being that I just had an amazing time at a Mandy Moore concert. As in, it’s probably in my top 5 concert experiences of all time, including Morrissey, Portishead and the Beta Band.

I got tickets because Sara is a huge fan. My main concerns going in were that I feared it would be boring, and I also feared that it would be embarrassing for Mandy Moore, considering that most pop stars play the Qwest Center and here she was playing Sokol Auditorium. When we arrived, I discovered it was Sokol Underground. It seemed like it only had potential to get worse.

We got there a little late, and I immediately had to head to the restroom for a second appointment with my triple Haystack from Dinker’s about an hour earlier. From the restroom, though, I could hear the last two songs of opening act Chris Stills – son of Stephen Stills – and I was very impressed. He could easily be branded a Jeff Buckley impersonator if not for the fact that he had the vocal power to pull it off, creating a confident beauty not often found in opening acts. At least that’s how it sounded from my stall.

Ben Lee’s follow-up was fantastic. He was a shameless crowd-pleaser, but with enough self-deprecation that the charm outweighed the cheese. I had never been much of a Ben Lee fan – the last time I deliberately listened to his music was in the late ’90s – but this set won me over. He definitely plays the irony card in a lot of his songs, but there was an obvious layer of genuine passion beneath it all. He wasn’t afraid to go for laughs, but he closed out his set by declaring “This is the way music should be enjoyed – just a bunch of people having fun in a room together.”

Sokol Underground is little more than a room – a hot, sweaty, low-ceilinged, black-walled room. In other words, probably the last place I would ever expect to see Mandy Moore in concert. From her between-song banter, she kind of made it sound like the Pop Princess wanted to slum it up with a “real” band – going out on the road in a bus, playing clubs. Like it was role-playing or something.

And occasionally, it felt like you could take the kid out of the theater but you couldn’t take the theater out of the kid – there were a few embarrassing bouts of air guitar; each lyric was facially broadcast to the back row, apparently carrying the weight of either a baby being born or a friend dying.

But surely old habits die hard, and when it came to getting the impression that Moore was acting, that’s where it ended. Everything else tonight felt astonishingly pure and sincere. This didn’t seem like a pop star and her backing musicians – this felt like a band that was having the time of their lives.
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I don’t know why you’d get a dog if all you’re going to do is leave it tied up out in your yard so it can bark incessantly. That doesn’t seem to be a pleasant life for the dog, and it certainly isn’t for the neighbors.

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