I don't know about you, but I love Frank & Ernest by Bob Thaves (to whom credit for this amazing comic goes). It's so frank, heh. Yeah, so this comic pretty much sums up my life right now. There's so much going on and, honestly, if I don't laugh about it from time to time I'm liable to crack. I cut this comic out of a newspaper about a zillion years ago (or, ya know, in 2004) and found it in a drawer the other day. Maybe its a coincidence, or the universe telling me something, or whatever, but it made me laugh. Then I looked it up online and saved it because I need it to remind me that sometimes, things just happen.
I know I've said this, but this year has been so damn terrible. First, I was sick for 10 days, and not a little sick, but really, really sick. I've not been that sick in more than a decade. I was sick sick! Not a great way to spend 10 of the first 15 or so days of the year, but I recovered. Then, our car was acting like an asshole, so we took it to the shop and they wanted $1,000 for parts and labor to fix it. Like I just have a random grand laying around to get it fixed, or something... yeah, not so much, so it didn't get fixed. It's running okay for now, so I'm not sure what's going on, but it's a good thing because we can't afford to get it fixed. Then, we hit a major freeze, the pipes under our house froze, and we didn't have water for 4 days. That royally sucked, though being out of school/work for nearly a week made up for it slightly. Then, when we it thawed out our pipes had burst and flooded the underneath of the house. Awesome. We had to get that fixed or we wouldn't have water, which turned out to be less of hassle than I thought it would be, but still.
Yeah, all of that and it's only mid-February... but that's not all, oh no, not by a long shot.
On Wednesday, yeah, the day after Valentine's Day, I logged into my email to find PayPal notifying me that some asshat had made 65 mass transactions on our account. Again, awesome. They were anywhere from one cent to ninety cents, and in the course of an hour and a half, which is about how long it took them to make all those transactions, they'd siphoned off about $10. I called PayPal who were helpful, but only after making me wait on hold like twenty minutes and talk to a "specialist" who was nice, but really not all that special. He couldn't figure out why it was happening and the only thing he could do to stop it was to put a limitation on my PayPal account. So, now, we can get money into our PayPal account, but we can't take it out. Which means I can get paid from Demand, but I can't access the money to pay my bills. Not, fucking, cool. So, while PayPal tries to figure out what the hell is going on and decide whether fraud protection wants to refund me, my bank account is going into overdraft to pay the bills, even though we have the money to pay our bills in PayPal. Have I said awesome? Yeah.
In the process of trying to put the limitations on my account, PayPal informed me that they may have hacked my account with information from my computer. This, my friends, is bullshit. I scanned my computer with a virus scanner, twice, and with a malware scanner, twice, and there is not even a single misplaced cookie on my system, let alone a virus. I tried to tell them that someone had applied for API credentials on my PayPal account and that was how they were getting the money, but the guy at PayPal wouldn't listen to me. API credentials allow whomever is using them to access my account remotely. So, rather than cancelling the API permissions, or blocking them, they're limiting my account and telling me it's my system, which it clearly is not.
So, here it is, Friday and I still have no idea what they're doing to fix this. I think I'm going to call them. This huge fiasco has caused me to have to go to the bank and put a stop pay on anything coming from PayPal, which caused my bank to reject a previous payment through PayPal, which they shouldn't have rejected. As I'm sure you can imagine, I'm quite livid. PayPal is supposed to be secure. It's supposed to be safe! I've toyed with opening a new PayPal account in Matt's name and attaching that to my Demand account, so I can still get paid, but I wouldn't be able to get a debit card on that account for 90 days, which really affects my ability to pay my bills. Not everyone accepts PayPal, so it's nice to be able to use the PayPal MasterCard to pay for stuff. I hope they can get it worked out and this stops happening because I really need that account.
Yeah, on top of that, Matt's computer has been making the most atrocious noise. I spent some time looking at it on Thursday night because if his computer croaks I am going to lose it. I don't think I can handle one more thing going wrong this year. I managed to solve the problem, it's the fan on one of his video cards. Since he has two video cards, put together with an SLI bridge, I just unplugged that video card from both the SLI and the power supply. So, he's running with one video card like the rest of us mortals, poor him. Of course, for some reason, one of the fans on his computer is making a rhythmic on off sound for about five cycles when we turn his computer on, but that's the only time it does it, so I'm ignoring it because otherwise, his computer is working okay again.
Like I said, if one more thing goes wrong... I might just need extended psychiatric care. I'm not built for this kind of constant stress. My job, and graduate school, provide me with more than enough entertainment (read: stress), I don't need everything else in my life to come crashing down around my ears, too. I swear, when we were at the store today, I bought junk-food and cheap wine. I need them to cope and they're cheaper than therapy, which is my next move if the liquor doesn't work. The only really good news is that my thesis topic seems to be working out and I'm getting things rolling with that. Thankfully that weight is off my chest, at least for the time being.
Okay, enough bitching. I'm off. I hope you have an amazing weekend. For my part, I'll be doing homework and grading papers... and gorging myself on crap. Awesome.
