Nickle and Dimed

Every time I turn around it seems there’s another fee or another hurdle placed in the way of me living my life.  Here’s some examples…

Tried to pay my gas bill online.  Should be simple and easy right?  Isn’t that what they want?  Minimal customer interactions, everything done digitally.  Nope, instead of letting you do it for free or at least on the cheap, they want $9.95 to pay with a debit/credit card online.  Are you kidding me?!  I understand the whole credit card processing fees, the extra cost of having a secure website to process the transaction, but $9.95?  Isn’t that excessive?  And considering it costs $0.41 to send it in, if you plan ahead.  I think they cut you a deal if you do a direct transfer from your account to theirs, but I am not sending my bank info into the wild.  At least with a  credit card you can track it pretty easily and if someone gets a hold of it you won’t get cleaned out y’know?  So we’ll trek to the pay station tomorrow to pay the bill instead of having it done right now.

And Comcast…charging $3.95 to speak to a live person?  Get real.  Same way with your card fees.  It’s in the mail.

And the water company who told me that they would process my request to turn on my water and I should expect to have it on the first part of the week after we moved in.  Not like I needed to have water for the first weekend I was in the new place.  Technically, I wasn’t a renter until the day I set it up, so I couldn’t get services yet.  Messed up.

Don’t even get me started on my garbage folks. Take away my cans because I didn’t pay no big deal…it is my fault.  Take them away because you lost the record of my payment and make us come into the office with the receipts to prove we had paid, then not give us the cans back until after the weekly collection so we have an extra weeks worth of garbage festering in the garage just pisses me off.

And a date is like a Mastercard commercial:

Dinner for 2: $47

Movie with candy for 2 $35.50 (yeah, really, almost as much as dinner!)

Date night with the wife:  Priceless (but broke…)

It all makes me want to pack up and move into a single-wide in the deep backwoods, off the grid, off the map.  Or not, I saw Deliverance.