My new fucking anthem, at least for today, at least until I manage a good night's sleep:
Not much news today. It will be the first day I get an editorial published through work. With my real name and my photograph and everything. Obviously it will revolutionize the industry and I will be in international demand, especially in warmer sunnier countries. Vanity google searches will become just that little bit more rewarding. And probably I will sleep through the whole thing, or at least want to.
Elsewhere - remember the Belgacom fiasco? I was reminded of it incidentally yesterday whilst making an effort to resolve a new fucking fiasco, this time with our former bank Fortis, another near-bankrupt Belgian corporate monster of incompetence. They sent our unpaid house insurance bill to a collections agency, which I found mortifying, by the way - I worked for a collections agency for a week once before getting a real job, and I hate collections agencies, and I had always resolved to not have much to do with them. And to be fair, the bill was unpaid, because they hadn't been sending us any bills, at least at this address - the address that
1) I live at
2) The F-word lives at
3) The insurance coverage is for
4) Our statements and promotional material came to.
No. Instead they'd been sending the bills to a defunct address (the shitty school we'd stayed at when we arrived). For the last four months. Willful fucking stupidity. Fucking pig ignorance. It's not even a scam, because the collection agency is only charging us an extra 10 euros or something - they're not making money off it - and in fact, Fortis is probably losing money off it because of selling the debt to the collections agency. A collections agency who obviously took one fucking look at the addresses involved and could somehow figure out that they could probably reach us for our house insurance bill at our house where we live and receive our correspondence.
And the cherry in the virgin is that just a month ago, the F-word had been to Fortis and inquired into the terms of our house insurance, and the very helpful cretin he spoke to took the time to print out our contract for him and explain some of the finer points. Without noticing, or at least saying, that we owed the bank over 200 euros and they'd been trying to get payment since April on that contract.
I was talking about this last night with San Francisca and her Dutchman who were all a-twitter with excitement and I was all a-twitter with excitement for them, actually, as he's just found a massively excellent job in Amsterdam and they are going to move there soon, fulfilling one her dreams. That means when the F-word and I buy our bit of rainforest we can house swap anytime they want some sort of Crocodile Dundee experience and anytime we want a bit of Olde Worlde Culture and legal marijuana.
I haven't met a nationality that wasn't happy to mock the intelligence of Belgians, but I've never met people who do it with more dedication and detail than the Dutch. The Dutchman was in full fucking flight last night - I'd set him off by innocently asking why he'd been concerned that Dutch employers might not place any value on his Belgian work experience. Apparently the idea, for the Dutch, isn't that Belgians are stupid in the flat sense of the word, but that they're utterly incapable of communicating with each other or other people once they're part of any sort of organizational structure, and utterly incapable of seeing any sort of broad, abstract purpose to that organizational structure in terms of what customers were using it for or in terms of money generally. It's a broad and uncharitable conclusion but I haven't yet found any evidence to contradict it.
Anyways, if anybody who is obliged to move to Belgium for work stumbles across this: quick word of advice, don't use Fortis; it's been a never-ending comedy of errors with them. ING has been great, and has the lowest fees as well, as in none, which may be unique here - I'm not sure.
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