KINDA… anyway, today’s deck is Apostle of Dstiny.
I didn’t expect to add decks to regular rotation two days in a row but not complaining!
Today’s reading is advising that if I feel like things aren’t flowing, I should take time to sit back and reassess where I’m going (with the small nuance of “but don’t get tunnel vision about it”).
Lots of readings recommending meditation lately… maybe I should catch the hint.
So here’s the reason for the big KINDA up there: This post will go live and the date stamp will say August 22nd, but because of how I post these lately (it changes sometimes mind you) it’s gonna cover what happens on the 21st instead.
So what I’ve decided is that I’m gonna acknowledge the milestone, but save any retrospectives for tomorrow. That said, it’s worth point out that this post is gonna be post 355, meaning that even though I’ve dilligently kept the routine of one post between waking up and going to bed, I ended up drifting away 10 days which is interesting.
Also it’s better that I save any retrospective for tomorrow because today’s been kinda eventful anyways.
The saga with my debit cards finally ended in the most hilarious way possible. But first let’s recap, as much a refresher as for the sake of the tale I’m about to tell.
Around late May an issue started happening with my debit cards. The way the process works is that I log into my bank, recharge them, and then that’s basically a deposit to the card company who then reloads my cards. But by that point some money would just… never land? The app would be like “we can confirm the money arrived” but then the card’s balance wouldn’t change.
This just… kept happening, it wasn’t an isolated case, of course it became stressful that I would recharge my card and it would be a gamble whether or not the card would be reloaded properly, which led to my finances being all over the place because the money, MY MONEY, wouldn’t be available to me, and of course it happened by the end of the month when I gotta pay everything.
I start calling them at least once a week to ask what the fuck, eventually I start bothering both my bank and the card company at once.
One month in, my cards get blocked. I start scrambling everywhere for payment alternatives. I keep pestering both entities with “hey why am I blocked now”.
Two months in, one extra month of me asking on the weekly what the ever loving fuck is happening. I’ve gone from being polite because hey it’s customer service, they don’t deserve my anger to me escalating the language in the emails because jesus fuck man I’m locked out of my money and not only do they keep ping ponging me between each other all I want is to be able to use my money at all.
I’ve said it many times, if it was me being irresponsible I’d just truck along and take the hint but here it’s the company not doing what the company is supposed to do and not being helpful in solving the matter.
I get no replies so I do the pettiest thing I can think of and leave a negative review on google maps with a truncated version of everything I’ve mentioned, how it’s unacceptable for a card company to have had that problem with recharging my cards to begin with and how unresponsive they are. They eventually reply to the review with a boilerplate “We’re sorry, please send us an email” AS IF I HAVEN’T BEEN DOING THAT.
I finally get an answer from the bank as to why my cards are blocked: They need me to certify my identity via a web app of theirs, so I login and I get blocked because my phone number isn’t european or whatever. I tell them to move along with that please so I can get back to unblocking my cards.
THREE MONTHS IN, THIS BULLSHIT STARTED IN MAY AND WE’RE IN THE END STRETCH OF AUGUST they finally fix that shit… after I sent one too many mails basically going “oh with how fucking relentless you lot are blocking me out of my money for not sending a paper I’d expect you to lead by example and not take long with this bullshit”. I did the online verification, they can move on to-
I wake up to the card company terminating my contract with them.
To be more specific, I wake up with an email from my bank where the card company is terminating my contract with them and reimbursing any money still in the cards back to my account. Instead of unblocking they’re cancelling my cards.
Now, this actually saves me a couple of headaches because as you might expect with all the bullshit the trust was non-existent at this point, I wasn’t gonna use the cards anymore, at most I would’ve just used the money still in them and call it a day, having started to push for other alternatives.
The question remains though, on what grounds do they cancel the contract? Misuse of the cards? Inconsistency with the funds? Nope, they quote the clause of the contract where they reserve the right to cancel the contract with no explanation.
Do I get any answer or accountability for the whole bullshit with my recharges not landing? No. Do I get any acknowledgemente of the other cards that were blocked and never unblocked because they kept ping ponging me? Nope.
And so, because they reserve the right to not explain, that gives me the space to make up any explanation I want, and so I choose to believe that my 1 star review in Google Maps made them mad, buttmad, assmad, they got assblasted by a bad review. The big payment processor couldn’t take a little bit of public trashing. And if any of the useless fuckers wants to clarify that it wasn’t them being buttmad at a simple review, please be my guest and clarify. Until then I will flagrantly make up theories as to why it was terminated.
The cherry on top is that the termination contract was sent in French because of course it would be in French, me and the French are destined to clash at every stage in my life and apparently that fact extends to the French part of Switzerland.
To clear up my head after that nonsense I make the quick trip to Kyoto I mentioned yesterday to check the Volks shop. Well, I say Kyoto and it IS the Kyoto prefectire, but it’s in Nishioji instead of the heart of Kyoto itself.
I’d only been there once back in 2022, I took some photos in… the imperial gardens I think it was? And then went to the shop.
They told me they didn’t have the body I was looking for. Not only that, but that it was out on every shop.
Now, that’s not unheard of, in fact I remember back when I started collecting this doll brand specifically their L-sized chest pieces for MDD dolls were out of stock everywhere in a kinda similar way. And hey at least I got the clarification of “it’s out of stock everywhere” saving me from making a dumb daytrip to Akihabara just to satiate the curiosity.
There’s that rollout of new merch they’re doing on Saturday so maybe they’ll have the bodies there? We’ll see. Again, it’s more the curiosity on the matter than any urgent NEED to buy the body.
I did see (and I didn’t know this) that they started rolling out optional parts for other bodies, specifically a thicker thigh part which gives me ideas.
On the way back there was one last thing I had to take care of. If you read yesterday’s entry, I’ve been gathering stuff for my Visa application. There’s two things I’m currently missing: An insurance registry number and my own landline number.
I don’t have a landline phone because phones ringing give me anxiety from one too many times answering the phone to news of people dying. And also due to how I live I… really don’t need it? I have one because how else do I have internet, right?
I know the landline phone for my office (it was the only contact info I had because getting a phone number as a foreigner in Japan is a bitch and a half especially with one-year visas like mine) but I didn’t want to put that twice just in case.
I figured I’d buy a cheap telephone, call my cellphone and get the number. So on the way back I stop by Joshin and buy the most basic phone I could find.
I get back to my building and check the mailbox and there’s the new phone bill. It then occurs to me that hey that bill would have my phone number, right?
It did…
So in short: A French-speaking card company got fed up with me, I make a daytrip to confirm an out of stock item is out of stock, and I buy something that becomes obsolete after the easier alternative gets thrown in my face.
This might not be the restrospective post, but it sure is the most Fer day I’ve had in a while.