alliterations again – The Skytreader

Commerzbank Chapter Concluded

It’s been rather like watching a camel’s back as you add a strand of straw after another. Or, to use the German version of the expression, watching a bucket fill up with water one drop at a time. Until someone drops an iron block on the poor camel/indiscriminately turns the faucet on and the suspense peaks in one glorious heartbeat of chaos.

I have finally decided to relieve myself of the burden of being a Coschmerzbank customer. It actually happened quite some time ago but I’m only writing about it now that I’m at a comfortable level of confidence that my escape worked out well for me.

It turns out that Coscherzbank got my address completely wrong. Despite having presented them with my official registration documents (i.e., the Anmeldung, something everyone needs to do in Germany) they confused my street name. If, for example, I lived in Musterstraße they put me in Musterallee. Is it a mistake anyone could’ve made? Yes. Is it stupid? Heck. Yes. Very.

(As a software engineer, I can just imagine what must’ve happened when their customer support changed my address. He started typing in “Muster” at which point some form autocomplete must’ve kicked-in and suggested -allee and -straße. Guy absentmindedly clicks on the wrong option. But now I realize, this is what zip codes were made for. Both options do exist in Hamburg but in different zip codes. How the hell they didn’t clock that is beyond me.)

This is another mistake that I only figured out due to my own effort following-up with their frankly-useless customer support. I was one breath away from basically telling them how to do their jobs. It puzzles the mind how they can have such a relatively-decent customer support workflow, have agents that are, at least, confident in their jobs, and yet be just about as useful as a bookmark.

Anyway, despite having corrected that, for some mysterious ineffable reason, they still couldn’t get me the activation letter that would’ve finally re-granted me access to online banking. And I know for certain that they finally got my address correctly because I did receive some mail from this joke of a bank, just not the kind of mail that I so urgently needed from them. I know one should never attribute malice before ruling out incompetence, nor should one attribute human traits to faceless, soulless bureaucracy but it’s hard to feel neutral when I can get advertisements in my mailbox—apparently mailed no less than a week before I received it—and yet the activation letter is one of those things that “simply take time”. To add insult to injury, they are advertising their online banking to me when, you know, they can’t even apparently deliver that letter that will activate my online banking.

Hence, I began to consider enough is enough. Why should I stay with a bank who doesn’t give a flying damn about their customers? They feel so at ease taking their sweet time delivering me an important document but should the roles be reversed, they wouldn’t let me take the leisurely route, that much I can guarantee. Of course, this is not an action I could take hastily; having designated them as my “primary” bank, there are actually a lot of essential and automated payments going through my account.

Then fell the iron block. The faucet burst into the dangerously-full bucket. They decided to completely do away with the free tier of their banking services. Which meant, from my perspective, that they are basically asking me to pay them for their incompetence. The audacity. If I wanted to pay someone so they can treat me like dirt, Hamburg’s red-light district has, uh, ladies of that inclination.

(To be fair, this issue notwithstanding, I have a fundamental opposition to the concept of paying a bank for the mere privilege of having an account with them. But what their incompetence ensured is that I wouldn’t have second thoughts leaving them despite all the essential payments like rent, gym, and internet that I am making through them.)

I wouldn’t bore you with the details of which payment was what (nor do I have any inclination writing about how I spend my money). As of this writing, the only inconveniences I have suffered from my move was not having Netflix for about a week and a little surcharge from a transaction I made at the gym. I’m pretty confident that there wouldn’t be more.

Quitting accounts in Germany requires you to mail your formal request to quit, the whole stamps-envelopes-and-Deutsche-Post dance. This is when I realized that I have never actually sent postal mail in my life ever, until now. Yes, I am hardcore millenial, the only thing I purchase from my phone is public transport tickets, and I don’t take public transport. But out of sheer spite for this bank stuck in the last century, I learned how to distinguish between a mailbox and a trash can.

Unsurprisingly, they also took their sweet time processing my request. It got to a point where I just manually moved all my money to my N26 account because I’ll be damned if I get autocharged for my account come June 1. About a week before they started charging for accounts, still with no confirmation that they have processed my account closure request, they send me mail reminding me to accept their new terms and conditions where I reward their incompetence with a small monthly fee.

“Sehr geehrter Herr Estioco,” the letter started.

Don’t Herr Estioco me you bitch. I am done speaking German with you.

Palawan Photography

The waves rock our boat, turning our reef-hopping trip to an amusement-park feel joyride of sorts. Water splashes on the deck as we do a jump and a fine spray of sea water reaches my lips, blessing my tongue with its salty tang. An island, sun-soaked for everyone to see its lush, appears on the horizon. I take aim with my lens but, as I make sure that I have set the proper shutter speed to negate the wildness of waves, I acknowledge that, for the first time, my camera has proved insufficient for this adventure.

Don’t get me wrong. My camera performed as admirably as ever, taking shots as sharp as usual, limited only by the hands and eyes wielding it. But, as all cameras do, it could not record the feelings that made the trip impressible in memory. True, it recorded the beauty I saw of Palawan but it cannot capture the smell of adventure as we battled the waves, the flavor of sea-side air, nor that sun soaked smell served as my perfume for almost the whole time we stayed there.

I got into Palawan courtesy of the undergraduate research I am doing. Our project, Porites recognition, is part of a larger project in UPD. The researchers involved in the project went to Palawan to gather data. My role isn’t really field-related but I got included anyway.

Despite it being a research trip, it was adventure all throughout, from the waves to the food to the exploration of the city’s night spirit. The first day we rocked the waves, we ran short of fuel. We waited on a sandbar for further instructions. It’s beautiful, dreamy in quality, if not for the fact that it is a graveyard of corals damaged by dynamites. It is a peaceful spot in the middle of the sea nonetheless, as the resting place of innocent creatures should be.

I tried to travel as light as possible being that (1) it is generally a good idea to travel light, (2) pretty men travel light and (3) I did not want too much of my personal stuff to get in the way of the research equipment we brought along. As such I took a leap of faith and didn’t bring any medium to back up my photographs and I was too lazy and too much of a cheapskate to invest in a memory card more or two, to distribute my photographs across. It would’ve been fine until they took a fancy to my camera and I became an official photodocumanitarian of sorts.

I got all my pictures back to Manila safe and sound but I learned a valuable lesson nonetheless: the pictures I take belong to the people who made the shot, whether they are distinguishable/included or not in the final output, as much as it belongs to me. I should’ve been more responsible for our shared property. In my lapse of judgment I didn’t act like a photographer, even for a hobbyist, not even like the computer scientist I am trained as.

I am grateful for the trip. I am grateful for the adventure; heck, the last one I had was almost two years ago. But I am most grateful for the lesson on not cheapskating on the memories I hitch on my camera.

Another awesome way to start the year don’t you think? ~The Chad Estioco

Another Awsomazing Adventure Awaits

Hello main blog. Despite calling you my “main” blog I am aware that you are probably jealous at how kode.play hogged all my attention this past summer. It was unavoidable, being that I had to blog about my internship and that the posts created were inevitably technical in nature. But it’s over now.

I’m not sure that the posts will be back to my normal one-post-per-month quota though. I’ll be doing my thesis/special problem this year. And have I told you that, through some turn events, I’ll be doing this solo flight? (Anak ng…special problem nga) This early on, I’m taking leave that I may miss more posts.

(But wait! I got a back-up plan. In anticipation of some middle-term plan I’m hatching, I’ll be posting, instead of my usual tirade of words, a photograph of the month, taken by yours truly. That should be pretty easy for me to meet and squeeze in a schedule expected to be full eh?)

I never really planned to do my thesis solo. Maybe I did but that was only at the start of my college career; when I saw how chaotic things can get I started considering doing it with a group, a consideration I held on to until I received the email welcoming me to the research lab I applied to. My name was there, at the top, alone in it’s line, unaccompanied by those whom I contacted as group mates—a solo flight ticket. “Chad,” says Neil, a gifted artist I hang around with, “if you need a crying shoulder anytime this coming year, we’re here.”

In my renewed sense of optimism and belief in reasons reason does not know, I can’t help but feel that doing my thesis alone is a challenge especially meant for me. Back in high school, I always dreamed of the time I get to make a system on my own, large enough to make a decent dent on a CD’s 700MB worth of storage space. I don’t know how large do theses get but I’m pretty sure I’ll be exceeding the line count of the spaghetti behindGradeGrid or the 1087 lines of code behind the programming language I created for my Programming Laguages class. Well, here’s my shot at immortality, I say.

Months back, I said that my internship will probably be the longest three units of my life. Over at {kode.play();}*, I have a record of how many hours did I spend for my internship. I clocked in around 281 hours and 52 minutes in around 7 weeks. I created a timer program that will keep track of how many hours do I spend working on something, inspired by an internal tool from Azeus. I’ll be timing how much time will I spend on my thesis. Anyone wants to bet as to which will be longer, internship or thesis?

Stay beautiful, it’s a new beginning ~ The Chad Estioco

*Yep, I changed the styling of kode.play, to make it more geeeky. Rawr.

P.S. On “awsomazing”: For some time now, I’ve been watching my use of the word “awesome”—everyone is using it it’s become cliche already. I’ve been considering “amazing” as a replacement as it sits well with my alliterations and communicates the same meaning. However, it doesn’t have the same bang as “awesome”. So, I’m ~~stealing from~~ taking a leaf out of Jason Mraz and be using “awesomazing” from now on.

Wonder how long before the internet catches up? Anyone for another bet?