"Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -- unknown

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - Albert Einstein

we are not what we pretend.
August 06, 2002 - 5:12 pm

i'm fairly certain that it's not even worth posting here, but i've nothing else to do.

the story was a bank (perhaps it was a credit union, but i'm going to use bank..less letters) that was affected by the events of 9/11. see the bank's database was located near ground zero. due to the attack the banks atm machines couldn't talk to the database. the company knew this and had a choice. turn off all the atm machines until things get fixed (which took a little over a month) and screw their customers who needed to withdrawl funds OR keep the machines on, even though they knew that that machines couldn't verify that the account had the funds the customer wanted to withdraw.

to my shock, the company kept the machines on. if i lived in the area, i'd switch my business to this company based on this fact alone.

it seems it is true that "no good deed goes unpunished". some 4,000 people over withdrew something like 15 million dollars in that month. one person singled out in the article whose month end account balance never averaged over a couple hundered bucks withdrew over $10,000 in like 100 transactions.

for sure some of these 4,000 people were accidental over withdraws. i don't doubt that.

see the machines logged all the withdrawls, they just couldn't verify the funds.

so once the bank was back up and running, they sent out letters to the customers explaining what had happened and then did another totally amazing thing. they didn't demand the outright repayment of the money, they offered to turn the over withdrawls into very low intertest loans. not to shabby i think.

oh sure they could have just written off the money, but we are in reality here.

anyway, some people choose to ignore these letters, like the $10,000 person above. so the bank has lost it's nice person approach and is filing lawsuits against those who won't repay the money.

now, how the hell do you withdraw over $10,000 by accident when you account never has over a few hundred bucks?

basically, it's yet another installment of out lovely american people attemtped to profit from the attacks of 9/11. just like the insurance fraud folks and all the rest.

they say in times of crisis you see peoples true colors. you see how they really are.

there is no universal morality. there is universal right and wrong, good and bad. there isn't. every damn day i read the news or watch tv i see the proof. there's a universal law of gravity, you drop something...obeys this law. universal means it relates to and affects (effects?) everyone.

there's a universal rule that we oxygen. take it away, we die.

if we had universal morals, we'd follow them. all of us. not one religion, or one nation or one anything.

the rules we have are the rules we create for ourselves.

what the fuck am i babbling about? i'm way off where i started.

my point was yet...i just don't get people. i don't want to be a people based on my observations of others. i hate that 99% of the stuff we laugh at, be it a joke or whatever, is someone else's misfortune.

none of us are what we pretend to be. we wear masks. we act.

i'm f'ing tired.