if i ever have a dotter she's gonna be trained in muay thay, krav maga and brazilian jiu jitsu, plus have a CC license. men are shit.

True story.. teenage girl "accidentally" let of mace in my classroom last year.. evacuated the entire building.. two fire trucks two ambulances.. i had a chest cold and the mace mixed with my mucous, the core of my chest was burning so bad later that night i contemplated the ER

i have a fun story from many many years ago that involved a can of mace, drunkenness, a test shoot... and distractedly pissing afterwards. ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch! i think i'm lucky i was drunk because it probably hurt less. but it hurt so much it's the only thing i remember from that night.

anyway, a good pepper spray is good shit, ladies. if it can neutralize a bear it can fuck up a two-legged predator. don't leave home without it. just watch out for the wind!

jesus christ! i thought getting it sorta in my eyes once was bad.

both you guys' stories. yeesh.

i'm sorta debating going and telling my neighbours upstairs to shut the fuck up. whatever they're been doing for the past hour sounds like a bowling ball hitting the floor over my bedroom. fuck this.

ooof... apartments. i do not miss that. is this the new place or the one you'll leave soon?

place i'm leaving. gonna start packing after this weekend. i have two weeks until my mini vacation. ugh.

the french will start bangin on your floor with a broomstick if you're making a racket

most decent people will get the message

my experience with gringo yahoos however is that instead of piping down with this signal they start to communicate in morse. it's probably the same with yahoos all around but i don't have that experience.

calling the cops is a bit much unless it's domestic violence

but asking the building manager to talk to them is probably the best thing-- if there's a guard/super/porter/something on duty

it's always tricky to talk to neighbors... they can be pretty nice or they can be real assholes

one time i had a noise complaint for some salvatrucans under my floor...went to talk to them it was like 40 people crammed into a studio apartment having a party. they woulsn't shut it. security guard wasn't around. i started bangin on their ceiling. their response was to send 4 drunken guys to pick a fight with me--i tried talking but they just kept insulting and trying to invite me out. so i called the cops who swiftly arrived & broke the party. poor fuckers were evicted soon after-- they had it coming though...trashed the place, beer bottles in corridor, overoccupancy (5 people in a studio), etc. lucky for me they weren't armed that day--they could have shot through the flimsy door. uffff....

i don't miss living in a shitty apartment with shit neighbors

Just checked my mobile banking and I've had my account cleared out but some unauthorised money transfer. Tried calling the fraud hotline but it's only open 8am - 9pm... The joys of 24 hour banking!

oh, damn, dude!!!!

i'd offer you a drink if i could upload one

well, don't panic-- i had a couple of scams done like that once and all my money was returned-- though they were small sums

oh no, that's awful, stu :[ i hope you can get it back. happened to me a few times and got a bit of it back- hopefully you have better luck.

@ schizo

so what happened with the shit-kickin', speed-takin', truck-drivin' neighbors upstairs?

Shit, good luck. Do you have card protection?

it went on ebbing and flowing til 4:30-5 and eventually i heard security at their door, so the folks across from them must have said something before I ever did (I took a sleeping pill and got too tired to move). they're international students, and I hate to generalize but a lot/most of them are here totally alone/have no clue about a lot of customs/know english just enough to pass toefl so it's a perfect storm of getting away with crap.

oh, you could have totally lorded it over them, then (maybe).

good thing they're not like the characters in that beck song

suchfriends-- haha. god, i don't miss the semester i was in the dorms. i don't know how anyone does it.

which beck song?

and eh, i could, but given my precarious situation here i don't like drawing attention to myself.

I think all major banks protect against this type of fraud now so I'm not too worried and think I will get all my money back... Should find out today.

you should not be worried. this happened to me before and I got my money back (someone withdrew a lot of money from my account in Medelin, Colombia).
I am not sure about Britain but as long as Slovakia has this kind of law offering account protection, I am not worried about UK not having one.
In fact, I think this is something regulated by the EU itself, so worry not.

It happened to me 4 times before. The last time I went to withdraw some cash and the next day it turns out that some people were buying themselves shoes in Berlin. I always got my money back though. I'm not sure what it's like for other banks, but Halifax made the process of getting your money back easier by refunding your account up to £300 without asking you to report the crime to the cops. They do that for you. If they nicked more than that amount from your account you'll have to report it to the police first and then you go to see them.

if anyone wants me to show them the proper computer security to avoid this crap, pm me.

personally i dont use a smartphone for banking and never will.

wi fi hotspots are not safe. not shielding your pin with your hands is not safe. not touching the atm to see if its got a fake cover put on is not safe

A bank fraud hotline that isn't open 24/7? Not much of a hotline, is it?

I had it happen once with a debit card. The bank actually notified me before I noticed it. "You live in Iowa, right? You're in Iowa today. You weren't in Brooklyn, New York, this morning, were you."

The perp started out by testing the waters with .25 and .50 parking meter fees, then with a fast food purchase, and had gone on to a $25 purchase in a store, and then the bank called me.

I managed to get through to it today but they said they were really busy and would have to call me back tomorrow evening!

Great service :rolleyes:

oh shit, man! that's fucked up.

i'm sure you can find someone to float you some walkaround cash while things get in order, but you might wanna keep an eye on any auto-pay bills, outstanding checks, subscriptions, etc-- might create more headaches if they bounce. or will the bank just let them through?

is this an online bank or does it have a branch anywhere near where you live?

i never banked from my phone or anything, but was skimmed by a physical device using my card in public. shit happens :[

i'm sure it'll work out fine, stu. if you can call any of your services linked to your acct (bills, etc) and say hey, this happened, they should understand.

i took my stupid menu test at my job, i get results back later. i know i missed two or three ingredients in a few things but hell. it was 10 pages. watch me barely make a threshold or something stupid.

These thefts of your cards are ussually done by clerks at stores. They store your numbers and sell them to some asshole who then sells them online to fucks who use it to buy shit somewhere else.

It is really really low-tech, and most times does not involved anything you could have prevented via firewalls, codes, VPN's, etc.

Fucking Apple..
So now iTunes seemingly randomly refuses to play the entirety of songs and skips to the nexttrack even if you try to manually skip forward through the song. No problems on the iPod just the iTunes player on my computer. This is precisely why i use Windows Media Player (thst and iTunes has tendency to crash my computer) but for some reason im also having trouble adding some song to my media player library so to listen to them i have to use iTunes...

Its not a particularly bad problem but its just more annoying bullshit from Apple.. if the iPod wasn't such a bad ass product i would soooooooo move on. iTunes has ALWAYS been a hassle


Cue !@#$! certified Apple Apologist post in 3..2..1

I dig the ipod as a music player but have always hated hated hated itunes and the completely ignorant way they set up their sync. It drives me insane.

Everything about iTunes drives me insane.. and the last updates DESTROYED it functionally, the thing is so ass backwards its ridiculous

what they'd change? i just use spotify nowadays

Everything

passed my test, whoo.

the sync thing always fucked up my ipod any time i used it. just started using my phone anyways once all my roommates fell into the klepto category. i liked to make all my mp3 data lowercase (artist, album, etc) and by god did itunes hate it.

There's a special level of hell for people like you.

This is true. College kids working in restaurants are a problem in our town. That's how mine got taken, I think. A waiter was gone a long time with our card when we dined out a few evenings before the fraudulent charges appeared on my card.

I remember waiting and waiting, thinking, "Crap, the card's getting declined. Is my balance really that low." The kid came back and said, "Sorry, no problem with your card, our machine is just running slow."

Uh, right.

Always be suspicious if your waiter or waitress doesn't come back with your card right away.

We've had a similar problem with the pin machines at work recently. Something to do with the wireless connection in the building, and other technical stuff you don't want me to list on here to spare you some extra anxiety to deal with. Luckily in the UK people normally don't seem as harsh as you when ''kids'' are handling their transactions going wrong. I know this because I am their first port of call when it comes to complaints.

Remember Genteel, suspicion is an American tradition

It's not that, it's just that I've never heard once someone blaming those little shits. Not even my mate Lord Archer, who's a first class arsehole when he talks to his servants.

Again, Americans are suspicious of everything and everyone. Maybe we all inherently understand our very nation was founded on treason and hypocrisy so our entire culture and ethos is built on the ingrained paranoia that the bottom should inevitably fall out?