August 25, 2007
CITI Bank student loans suck update
I got a response from CITI - they will allow me to pay the backdated interest before it is capitalized onto the loan (though, not really, because they're offering to let me pay the amount which increased from capitalization for each backdated month - gee, thanks guys!!!)
To quote:
"On 08/15/07, we were notified that you were no longer in school as of 5/20/07. Therefore we ended your In-School deferment for loan 21 on 05/20/07; which would make your first payment due 06/18/07. [...] Since your deferment had ended in the past, we could not make your first payment due in the past; therefore, an Administrative forbearance was approved for the period -5/21/07 to 08/14/07."
Gotta love their logic. We can't bill you retroactively, but damnit we'll charge you interest! I suppose I should be happy they didn't charge me late fees and put liens against my property and paychecks?
Oh, wait - speaking of late fees - a bonus: my American Airlines credit card with CITI got slapped with an (1-day) past due charge, even though my bank records indicate that they withdrew the funds (epayment) on the due date. Yeah, I'll be canceling this card; I want as little to do with CITI as possible.
Posted by griffjon at 08:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 17, 2007
Loan Sharks
So, one of my loans will have entered repayment on the 25th (or at least that's when citi will mail me my first bill). It's already gathering interest dust on it however.
I can't set up an auto-payment from my bank that's more than the minimum amount due (said amount of course maximizes the interest I pay to citi; not something I want to do). I can reschedule my loans once they both enter repayment (the other will do so in November). To pay more than the minimum I have to go through a rather painful web process to extract money from my bank with no way to automate/schedule payments.
Said online payment system is wonderful, not only because of its usefulness, but because you have to go out of your way to read the fine print and click the box to apply your payment to the principle. Otherwise, it just applies it to your monthly interest servicing. So I could make a payment of $500, and if I didn't check that box, it would just pay a fraction of that every month to my monthly statement, prolonging (and increasing) my interest payments.
Double extra bonus? if you go to the trouble of paying online and remember to post the "extra" to your principle, your automated monthly payments of the minimum get fubared: "Attention E-Z Pay customers: Payments made online may advance your next payment due date. Please note this may change or prevent your regularly scheduled automatic payment from processing."
So not only have they started charging me interest without telling me (nor is the date of when these things change available online, and the customer reps have to do extra work to find it), it's made very difficult to pay anything but the interest-payment maximizing minimum. Thanks, Citi, are you familiar with the term "predatory" ?
This story gets better; I've earned $100 in backdated interest. The backstory:
I graduated GWU in May. They're horribly slow about updating CITI about my graduation date - surprise. I'd called CITI in early June to check with them, and as I'd not been listed as graduated I was told that I was not gathering any interest. I checked - when GWU did get around to updating my information, would I get backdated charges? I was explicitly told that I would not. GWU just notified CITI yesterday (Aug 16th), and I immediately got three backdated interest charges applied to my account. I just got off a huffy call with a CSR who basically told me that yes the agent had given me incorrect charges but no they would not remove them or backdate a payment to June... So I find their online contact system:
I am very displeased with CITI's handling of my loans and customer service representatives I have spoken with. Upon my May 07 graduation, I called CITI to investigate payment options. I was told that GWU had not listed me as graduated and that I would not accrue any interest payments until they had done that. I clarified this statement to make sure that none would be applied as back-dated, and was told they would not be. On August 16th, however, three interest amounts were added to my account (21) for a total of $95.12. I called customer service to investigate this charge and was told that these were interest charges from June, July and August, and what the representative had told me in June was incorrect. Had I been told that interest would be back dated, something I specifically asked about, I would have begun making payments, which is why I carefully clarified that point. It is reprehensible that CITIs representatives would give false information in the first place, and worse that they are powerless to remove these charges which I was ensured would not exist. Providing false information and not offering to do anything to make up for it, especially with loans, is irresponsible, poor business practice, and bordering on predatory.I will be satisfied when these three interest payments are removed from my account. I have filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, and will remove it once this issue is resolved.
Their response rate to BBB complaints is decent, so I'm hopeful for something at least.
To quote xkcd, "what now, bitches?"
Posted by griffjon at 01:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 23, 2007
Gradumicated
I went through all the "fun" ceremony of graduation last weekend. Being GWU, however, the ceremony does not confer graduation status, as they haven't picked through all the records and requirements yet. They saw fit to remind us about this on every piece of documentation, including, tackily enough, the printed program itself.
So, barring incompetence on my part of GWU's, I'll get confirmation sometime in June. I've decided that GWU tries to train its students to work with the government on meta-levels by throwing slowness, bullheadedness and sheer paper-chasing bureaucracy at them at every option.
In June I transition to full time at my current employer, which could be fine for the time being, provided that I can detangle myself from the reactive stance part-time + random disasters have forced on me. Seriously - since Feb:
*Our Exchange server lost a hard drive went down, exposing also incomplete backups and poorly set-up RAID configurations, it was never fully recovered, causing loosing permanently 2 weeks of email and 2 months of hassles in fixing settings to get it to send properly.
*Our firewall melted, causing Internet to drop every few minutes
*One of the UPS batteries died
*Our Big Event of the year has happened
*The website transition to a new CMS site - it's gone as well as any transition of such scale could go, really. Had there not been constant other problems, it'd've been a bit more calm
Anyhow, once I'm fulltime I hope to control all that easier and try to get away from just being the IT guy, and get proactive in looking for ICT - in -Dev type things I can do through my job.
My GF (A) will be in China for most of the summer, leaving me to find other ways to occupy myself. I'm going to try to get into better shape (spring semesters suck, and the winter didn't help either), and get re-involved with Esperanza, seeing what I can do with them remotely. I'm not sure how much time I'll have to take off to parts unknown, but I am feeling the Itch to get out of the country for a while. A is presenting at a conference in India in the early fall, and we're pondering a pre-con trip there.
Posted by griffjon at 08:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 30, 2007
Tired
Dear Universe,
I just wanted to ask if I'd done something to make you unhappy. I will right whatever grievance you have with me, there's no reason to resort to passive-aggressive measures such as melting the firewall at work, while at the same time messing with our DNS changeover causing the new nameservers to claim that 0.0.0.0 was the correct IP for our website. I'm really busy writing my final papers for this semester right now, and don't have the time to deal with this crap. Thanks.
jon.
Posted by griffjon at 09:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 16, 2007
Tech and Social Justice
I'm taking this course at Georgetown's equivalent to my tech policy program at GWU, based on the short description and title of the course - I mean, it's right up my alley! The syllabus, which I was finally able to access yesterday, leaves me a bit worried. The first things we're reading are Sachs' "End of Poverty" (What we've been doing hasn't worked because we haven't done enough of it!) and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (What the global poor really need is to be transformed into consumers!)
Ugh. Either this is "shock therapy" (like Sachs likes to use on country's economies by liberalizing them rapidly), or I'll be the class firebrand. I guess I need to read up on my Easterly!
Posted by griffjon at 11:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 05, 2006
Fixing (some of) my GWU problems
Task 1: Verify that GWU will not send my loan monies back due to the course snafu
Time on hold: 26 minutes
Time to verify: less than 1 minute
Task 2: Get GWU to update my enrollment status to my lender
Time on hold: about a minute
Time to fix: not fixed. I have to print a form from their website and fax or carry it in to their office (during normal office hours of course)
Task 2a: Check with my lender to see if they automatically did it on the first day of school.
Time on hold: 1 minute.
Time to fix: 2 minutes. GWU has in fact, contrary to what the office of the registrar said, automatically updated my enrollment status. This is the second call I've made to my lender, and they're batting 1000 with customer service thus far.
Task 3: Call Student Accounts and see why my ISTP award, listed as an award, has not been credited to my account. Student Accounts gets extra bonus points for having a huge scrolling marquee on their front page.
Time on hold: 10 minutes (more bonus points for the infinite loop of "please hold, your call will be answered in turn")
Time to fix: not fixed, they suggest checking with ISTP (though I don't think it's their problem)
Posted by griffjon at 08:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 03, 2006
More GWU hassle
Registering for fragging courses shouldn't be the most stressful part of grad school!
The saga continues. So, you might remember that I was somewhat forcibly removed from a Dev Econ class I really wanted to take, because I'm not in the Elliott School's Dev Studies program, I'm in the Elliott School tech policy program. It's not like it's the same school or anything.
As the paperwork for my independent study has not gotten through the digestive system of GWU's paper-loving bureacracy, this means I'm registered for all of 1 course. This has caused me a few difficulties since.
First, GWU hasn't listed me as enrolled AT ALL with my lending bank, so they sent me a bill. They were surprisingly helpful on the phone and mailed me a form to take to GWU to get my still-enrolled, damnit! deferment. That's a task for this coming week. Even then, I'm not enrolled full-time (yet), so I'm not sure what insanities this will cause with their computer systems.
Second, I get a letter Saturday postmarked and written on Sept 1st regarding my loan amount which was disbursed on Aug 30 to GWU. They can't give it to me because I'm not in their computer systems yet as being registered from at least 6 course credit hours (see above), and they are required to send it back to the Feds within 3 business days if that's not resolved. I'm really hoping that their computer systems recognize that Monday is not a business day. Nice of them to take 2 of those 3 business days to decide to mail me a letter - if it'd been a Monday, I would've received the letter when I got home after 5pm on the 3rd business day. It's the 21st goddamned century. Send me a heads-up email, or, for matters of thousands of dollars in student loans, maybe try calling me? I'm asking too much for a place I'm giving nearly $3k/credit hour in tuition to, plus a $750/semester student fee, I guess.
Grrr.
Posted by griffjon at 08:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 13, 2006
Things I shouldn't be dealing with while in Nica
I am now only registered for exactly one course for the fall.
I #$&%@$%!* hate GWU and their lack of information about courses. I am not in a position to pay 20% or 80% or whatever of course-drop fees and over-subscribe to courses so as to find one that works and drop the rest after the first class. And I can't even do that, or sneakily attend first classes, because they all overlap one another anyhow.
Why can't they have reasonable descriptions online? In what world does someone invest that many hours of in class and out-of-class time, as well as pay almost $3k, on the basis of a bland sentence, especially when time and absolute number of courses to take is somewhat limited? I want CVs, syllabi, topics covered, reading lists, and ideally student reviews and UT-style slam tables, damnit.
Why can't I take half the courses in the International Dev Studies program? Why does my "advisor" wait until Aug 12 to tell me that he's kicking me out of an IDS course that I wasn't supposed to register for, instead of, well, when I was registering (during midterms and such) back in the spring?
I didn't really expect to find courses in IT and development, but not being able to find courses in either IT OR development really makes me regret my investment in stress, time and money, as well as going deeply in debt (for the first time in my life) for GWU.
P.S. Why does this have to be happening while I'm in Nicaragua?
P.P.S. Nicaragua, apart from this, is great. Hot, dusty, and muggy, but hey.
Posted by griffjon at 09:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 15, 2006
It's worse than we thought
So, I've been using CVS for this summer class to keep all my reading, presentation slides from the prof, articles for my paper, and writings themselves, in sync across my home laptop, my travelling Linux laptop, and my thumbdrive (and my work computer at times, and a private directory on my website).
Though it comes with some annoyances when handling big annoying docs in directory structures and not plain text files, it's made my life a lot simpler (no more counting files in a directory, sorting by most-recently-modified, etc.)
So yeah, I'm working on my paper at the GTown building (the roof has a great view of the potomac, electrical outlets and open wireless!), and I just raised my arms and shouted towards the Potomac "I LOVE CVS!"
I especially love the automatic version numbers. I am on rev 1.2 of my paper. It gives me a sense of accomplishment.
I think this qualifies me for dorkiness, beyond geekiness.
Posted by griffjon at 04:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 14, 2005
Educational systems
It blows my mind that universities pay huge money for crap systems like BlackBoard and WebCT when there's a system at least equally capable that's free, open source, and with a vibrant support/development community (moodle).
BTW, blackboard just sucks.
Posted by griffjon at 10:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 23, 2005
Development Discourse
There's an old joke about a prisoner confused at his first day in, at lunch. Random people stand up, announce a number, and the whole place cracks up. Consulting an older prisoner, it turns out that since they've all heard all the same jokes so many times, they just number them to save the trouble of repeating it all.
Sometimes I get the same feeling, reading development literature. Some central stories of development successes or failures get told over and over again. I imagine a group of development practitioners sitting around a table:
"Sudan famine, '98"
(all) ooooh. Hm. Yeah...
"..But, Brazil!"
(nodding)
"Korea vs. Ghana, 1950-2000!"
(shocked expressions)
"Toilet festivals!"
(more nodding)
...and so on. (that was an argument about elite capture of goods targetted at underprivilidged targets and misinterpretation thereof, and then gov't policies towards development, and then successful grassroots projects, FYI).
I wonder if this is a case of necessary categorization of recurrent problem types in development projects that humans are predisposed to do, or if it's over simplifying the situation. Probably both.
Posted by griffjon at 11:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 17, 2005
QOTD: World Bank
"Most critics appear to argue that the [World] Bank would be more culturally adept if it issued ten thousand sandals to its staff and sent them out to attune themselves to local cultures. But is this the most effective strategy?"
-- Sabina Alkire, Culture, Poverty and External Intervention
Is it bad that this made me laugh out loud?
Posted by griffjon at 08:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 11, 2005
Work Balance
OK, so... Last week I was (again) a tightly wound ball of stress. This was mainly because I had this horrible idea to calendar out all my assignments for the semester, and then also look at it. It appeared entirely overwhelming. But now, a week into the overwhelmtion, I'm on track with what I have scheduled as milestones, and it was more manageable than I thought, and the econ midterm will be take-home, so no sweat, and we don't get it until the 18th, which means no interference from it onto my currently scheduled paper-writing due the 17th, and that will only minorly overlap with my 2 papers due on the 7th and 5 minute movie due on the 14th (I'll explain that as I get closer to it).
Also, due to various oddities in my reading shedule, I'm already caught up for next weeks reading, except in Econ, where I've been 2 weeks ahead until now, when I'm back on schedule (I was keeping with the syllabus instead of the class, which was helping my comprehension even less).
So yay. I'm trying to bitch less. I realize that this life that I'm living is indeed the life that from the outside I was envious of, and I'm trying to re-establish what the hell I was thinking. Oh yeah. part-time job, simple but pleasant living with occasional splurges, and lots of exposure to new ideas, and people to talk with about them.
Maybe I'm in a good mood because it's pleasantly chilly, not-hot, not-cold, just crisp, and I ate pizza, which often puts me in a good mood? Who knows.
Posted by griffjon at 10:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 25, 2005
Oriented
So, today was the big grad orientation!
Lots of info, greetings, people!
The morning was mostly intro-to-the-Elliott School, who's the staff/directors, the Library system (I like the librarian, he's into neologisms. He promised to "de-google-ize" us with "bibliotherapy". [1]
The noon hour was devoted to language diagnostics, which the International Science/Tech Policy (ISTP) people like myself are immune from. I almost took the Spanish exam anyhow, but it was a 30 min wait for a 40 min test, then scheduling a 15 min oral later... I opted for lunch and getting my student ID and library cards instead. I can always take the diagnostic during registration in October for the spring semester, or next fall, if for whatever reason I need it. Evidentally the Spanish diagnostic requires a lot of writing, and that's probably my lowest skill in Spanish right now. Maybe if I spent some time in Nicaragua over the summer doing IT-in-development field work, I could manage something (sadly, to get course credit for anything at GWU, you have to pay GWU tuition costs, the price of which is probably twice the amount I'd spend on airfare, food, and housing for a month in Nica).
I found all this detail out during the study abroad section. There are two semster-long programs that are interesting, one in Paris, one in Maastricht, Netherlands, and a summer program in Panama with USAID on a tourism-development project. I hope to take advantage of at least one of these programs, though I don't know what that will do with my job. They're very flexible, but they do need someone on-site who is familiar with their systems. I'll work with them as I learn more about these programs, their costs, value, and so on.
After that was the break-out with the individual programs. The bread and butter of the Elliott School is their International Affairs program, which has to have a hundered or so students in it. The ISTP program this year has 14 grad students, and Intl Dev group, which I also hope to work with some, has 25 or so. Which means we're small, but the faculty to student ratio is like 4:1 in the overall program.
At the end of the day was the student services fair, which was mostly stuff I'd already figured out the hard way, thanks, and a welcome BBQ for the entire GW grad class. The lines were insanely long, but I ended up getting to talk to people in other random programs that GW offers, so that was nice after being bottled up with the policy folks all day :)
Post-BBQ, the Elliott School grad students had a happy hour nearby (there's a Thursday Night Out, TNO, tradition... Annoying, as I don't have classes at GW on Thus this semester, but the timing could work if I work an hour later of Thus and come up afterward....) That was fun, but super-crowded, and my social batteries for the day were nearing empty, so I had a last-call of happy hour beer ($2 for a frickin' Miller Lite.... this town has no love for beer!), chatted for a bit with a fellow RPCV, and wandered homewards.
I think that's it! TIRED!
[1] DAMNIT I hate the "correct" grammar on placing punctuation inside quotes. It's so structurally backwards that it's not even funny!
Posted by griffjon at 08:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack