Whatever Again

I guess this is more just to prove that my net connection is working. Since Steam is being such a pain. I went off and left it updating for most of the day so that I could play C&C4, for which you have to be online or you lose your progress, Steam was finally saying that the downloads were complete and that I could play. Why it needed to update so much when the damned thing is only a week or two old is both beyond me and unforgivable to start with. But lo! I click 'play' and Steam instead goes to 'updating steam' mode.

Fuck that!

Log into Steam Powered dot com and, as usual, I cannot log in under my real account name and have to use a shadow account that I created some time ago since every time I log an issue with Valve the site thereafter refuses to recognise my password. Petty little shit of a website that. Six fracking times I have had that password reset. The Valve staff say that the password has to be numeric only, which is crap 'cos the shadow account is an alpha-only rude phrase about Steam and my main account used to work with an alphanumeric until they started screwing with it.

Anyhow, whilst I am here, so the NAB pissed me around with their online help (online, but three or four days later...), they sent me a link and some directions to download a PDF form to lodge a complaint about FriendFinders unauthorised use of my credit card. So I phoned them, but after twenty minutes on hold dropped that idea and decided to go to an actual branch and speak to real people. More than an hour later and nearly fainting from hunger (tip, eat lunch first next time) the woman says that the transaction was in GBP! Britain? I have not transacted with anything UK ever that I can recall, certainly nothing recently, in fact I know that I haven't done anything since I got back from SG nearly a year ago. At first I thought it was something to do with Adult Friend Finder, 'cos I know that company is a credit card thief, but they are based in the USA (like most net crims) not the UK. Puzzling. It will be a race to see whether the NAB refunds the thefts, which they say will take six weeks, or I finalise moving everything to HSBC and shut the NAB card. Either way, they have lost a twenty-year customer.

They used to be a good bank, but they stopped providing service a few years ago. Started using Indian call centres, even the online is Indian and does nothing but spew lots of words but no help. I reckon it was when they tried being the 'National' and forgot the 'Australia' part, kind of like how Community Aid Abroad merged with Freedom From Hunger and the resulting body was called Community Aid Abroad, surprise, surprise, but the CAA people got promoted, the FFH people got side-tracked, the FFH programs (which actually helped people) got strangled, and the CAA method of programming became the norm. I think you lose your soul with something like that. Yeah, CAA was never a good organisation, they funnel money into socially invasive projects that force their liberal socialist paradigm onto the recipients whereas FFH used to dig wells and build shelters and actually do something useful for people. Hasn't changed with the name change to 'Oxfam Australia' either.

Mind you, if there is one thing that I have learned in life, it is that if you give someone charity then they depend on it. They give up on trying for themselves and start parasiting on society. It is a bad thing to give freeloaders a dime, better to tell them to get a job. Seriously, I know that twenty years ago I would never have thought that I would think this, but it is what I have seen. This country is going down the gurgler with all of this welfare state mentality and the requisite humungous civil service bureaucracy it engenders. Yes, I sound like a grumpy old man, and I am, I know, but it's for their own good.