Thursday, June 17, 2010

I heart Public Holidays

Brrr. It is freaking cold this morning. Even the bunnies' water bowl had frozen over, that's the first time that's ever happened! Keep reminding myself they have plenty of fur and hay and each other to snuggle up with so they'll be okay in this cold weather.

Sooo, we had a public holiday yesterday, which was just as well because we went to work drinks of Tuesday afternoon. Well, it was one project team from our office and a project team from another company who we worked with on a recent project, so we all went out to celebrate at Mi Lounge. Left the office at 14h30 and eventually got home at 2am on Wednesday morning! It was a pretty awesome afternoon/evening :) Sadly tho, that does mean I missed my #365 photo of the day because I figured I'd take one when I got home ...

As you can imagine, Wednesday was quite slow. But in the evening I headed off to Doodles' to watch the Bafana-Uruguay game. Was lovely to see her and @Arkwife again, but sadly the soccer was a bit of a disappointment. I can honestly say I'm glad I wasn't at the game. It must have been freaking cold sitting watching in the stadium!

> Follow @Arkwife on Twitter:

In other news, I think I have picked my Peru tour! Now I just have to figure out the flights and bookings and come August or September I'll be outta here for 3 weeks :) Yayness. It came down to choosing between 2 very similar tours with 2 different companies, both of which I've traveled with before, Imaginative Traveller to Thailand and Intrepid to Spain, Portugal & Morocco. I was kinda hoping the ImTrav trip would win, but in the end, I have chosen the Intrepid tour.

> Follow Imaginative Traveller on Twitter:

I'm also seriously annoyed with Standard Bank at the moment! Like seriously. They have frozen my accounts. I got an sms a while back (more than a month at least!) saying I needed to FICA myself. So I called their call-center and asked what I needed to do. No no, they don't know why I received the sms cause they have FICA documentation for my from my bond application (from March), so I'm all up to date and can ignore the sms. Okay awesome. So I listened to them :P On Monday I discovered my frozen accounts and called them up. Nope, they have no documentation for me (do they throw this stuff away because I didn't take their bond?!). So I duly tried to FICA myself on Tuesday (my branch has closed down cause it got robbed too many times in 3 months apparently tho :P). I took along my Telkom statement ... which I printed out because I receive my statements online. Not acceptable apparently! I mean really?! My options now (because the original Telkom statement I have is more than 3 months old) are a) have some Standard Bank dude come to my house and sign some document saying that yes in fact I live there or b) get my land-lady to sign some co-hab document and bring in my lease (my lease is no good on it's own because it's a month-to-month lease with no expiry date). I was so pissed off when I left the bank (for so many reasons not least of which was actualyl having to go into a branch in the first place - hate it!), I could barely speak. Now what I'd love to do (if only this had happened a month ago!) is go in with a pile of documentation proving I live in a million different places and tell them to fucking pick my residence because their system sucks *so* much! I have my Telkom bill from March saying I live where I actually do, I have my car license from Feb saying I still live with Loulou, I have my SARS docs which say I still live with Varen and I'm pretty sure I could scrounge up some official letter which thinks I still live in Cape Town with my folks! I have always hated FICA. Before when I had no utilities and was living with boyfs, it was so hard to try and prove where I lived and I thought all my woes were over now that I had a Telkom account in my name ... but apparently not. Seriously, I am a law-abiding citizen who is not living in any sort of weird or stretch-of-the-imagination circumstances, how can they make this so fucking difficult for me?! How on earth do other people manage? My solution is to switch my Telkom statements back to postal (how else can I get "the original" :P) but I hate that that is the solution, it's silly and not very forward thinking of them. FICA, you *suck*.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I hate Fica too...Absa can be even more bizarre about it. I had a letter from my dad stating I live here with the utilities bill...apparently he has to write it on a bank letterhead?! So they think I still live in CT.

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