June 12 2008 – If you are a Wells Fargo Bank customer like I am you’ll want to avoid one branch in particular. The San Bruno California branch of Wells Fargo Bank is in my experience the worst of all the branches I’ve been to. They still can’t process a deposit properly.

As many of you know, I’m in the Spam Filtering and Web Hosting business. I host about 350 web sites and filter spam for about 4000 domains. Most people pay online with a credit card but I still get checks in the mail. And when you get checks in the mail sometimes who they make it out to is a little off.

For example, I have software sales and people pay “Computer Tyme Software”. But for hosting it’s called “Computer Tyme Hosting”. The spam filtering is “Junk Email Filter”. I also do email hosting through my “MarxMail” web site.

So about twice a month I gather up all the checks and go to the bank to make a deposit. I can go to every other branch of Wells Fargo Bank and just hand them my pile of checks and they deposit it. Some are made out to Computer Tyme and some to Junk Email Filter and it’s not a problem.

However – if I go to the San Bruno Branch of Wells Fargo Bank it’s a different story. Even though both names are on the account half of the time they refuse to process the checks unless they are made out exactly to “Computer Tyme Software”. If it just says “Computer Tyme” or “Computer Tyme Hosting” – they object. And if it’s make out to Junk Email Filter they also give me a hard time.

Not only do they screw up but they are insulting and confrontational about it. Every time I file a complaint online and someone usually calls me to apologize, Wells Fargo Bank of San Bruno just keeps doing it over and over.

This last time the manager there was a real asshole. His name is Amir. They had refused to process my deposit. I left and went up the road to the South San Francisco branch of Wells Fargo Bank where they made the deposit without and hassle at all. They were both professional and respectful as they were the last time this very thing happened.

This time however I took the deposit slip back to the San Bruno Branch of Wells Fargo Bank and showed them that other branches had no problem with the deposit. They insisted that all the other Wells Fargo Bank branches were doing it wrong and they were the only ones doing it right. Then the manager made the snide remark that he had “put a note” on my account. I said, “Oh yeah? What did the note say?” and he refused to tell me.

So now they are trying to somehow punish me by putting secret notes on my account and refusing to tell me what the note says. is this any way to treat a customer? Is this the way that banks get more business? Is this the way Wells Fargo Bank trains it’s management to behave?

So – if Wells Fargo is going to put a secret note on my account that I can’t see then I’m going to put a public note on the internet and expose them for what they are doing. The San Bruno branch of Wells Fargo Bank isn’t the only one who can play that game. We’ll see how their secret note compares to my public note on the Internet. When it comes to being an asshole – I usually win.

This Wells Fargo Bank branch is located at 875 El Camino Real, San Bruno, CA 94066. (650) 875-7064 – be sure to tell them you saw them listed on my blog!

I have been with this bank for 8 years. None of my checks that I’ve deposited have ever bounced. All I want to do is to be able to walk in and deposit and checks without having to get into an argument with morons. Is that too much to ask?

06-30-2008 folowup. Went to the South San Francisco branch with another deposit. Had some Junk Email Filter checks. The lady asked me about it because she said that an “Alert” was placed on my account. The alert said that they were NOT to accept and deposits for checks made out to Junk Email Filter. And she said that Amir was the person who created the alert.

I told them that was a mistake and it should have been an alert to deposit checks made out to Junk Email Filter. They took the checks and made the deposit.

A few days later I called the branch manager at San Bruno and discussed it with her. She claims she took the alert off. We will see what happens next time I try to make a deposit.

I was going to suggest that one of my dollars counted as 2 dollars but instead I decided to walk out and go to Taco Bell. I really hate it when companies try to screw you by doing things like claiming that some of their topping counts as two toppings. Sorry Extreme Pizza, you lost a customer today.

Never pick a fight with a blogger who buys data by the terabyte.

So – maybe by posting on my blog the message will eventually get to them and they can fix their problems.

If you are a Comcast customer and wondering why your email isn’t being delivered, it might have to do with the fact that Comcast’s mail servers are severely misconfigured. The main problem they have is that the reverse DNS lookup on their servers have an IP mismatch between what host they say they are and what the host name resolves to. When the server reverse DNS is looked up it returns a name. When the name is looked up it resolves to a different IP. What does the mean? it means the reverse DNS has failed.

So – if you are a Comcast employee or customer or stockholder – or have any Comcast commections – please tell them to FIX THEIR EMAIL SERVERS. I’m getting tired of having to take the blame for Comcast email not reaching my servers.

I bought the OCZ Gold Edition high performance ram and it’s clear that this memory is incompatible. It’s supposed to run at DDR2 800 speeds but even at DDR2 400 it still has memory errors. I’m hoping a future bios will fix this. Asus – you disappoint me. Fix your product!

So – the second phone was for a friend and it costs $20/month extra to be on my plan. However she reciently had to move to Wheeling West Virginia to care for a sick aunt. We would be more than happy to keep the service except for one problem. Verizon has no coverage in Wheeling West Virginia. Not even with roaming. Zero coverage.

So – not needing the second phone anymore I contacted Verizon to cancel the second line and now they want to charge me $175 penalty for early termination. Even though the cost of keeping it is far less.

So – several issues here.

My position is that the contract is a fee for service contract and I’m paying the fee but they aren’t providing the service. Wheeling WV is not some small town out in the boondocks. Wheeling is the 3rd largest city in WV with a population of 30,000 or so. Since Verizon is the nations largest cell phone provider and that AT&T has voverage there, Verizon could provide coverage as well. But they don’t – so since they don’t they are in breach of contract – not me.

Second – I extended the main contract but I see the add on line as an additional feature and that is a separate contract. Since the original contract is over two years old Verizon has already got enogh money to cover the cost of the phone. Since the terms of the contract would be the same regardless of if I had a second phone I don’t see the obligation as applying to the second phone.

Verizon said that they would agree to drop the second line but the conditions for doing so didn’t apply to our situation. They asked for a copy of the utility bill in her name. But there is no bill in her name because she is living with her dying aunt and the home and the bills are in her aunt’s name. I suggested other documentation but they are not cooperating. The are insisting on the utility bill.

Furthermore I read an article where the president of Verizon has said that they were going to stop these termination charges because they were pissing off customers liike me.

I don’t know if I’ll win this but I will make sure Verizon loses. There are some people you fuck with and some you do’t and I am a professional asshole and when someone screws with me I ensure that they lose money doing so. So because of this block Verizon will lose customers. I always make sure that corporate stupidity is never rewarded.

Several years ago MCI burned me. And I ended up doing This Interview on the CBS evening news.

I haven’t used this card but they already made three mistakes and all in their favor. That’s what I call – fraud.

06-23-2003 update
Looks like they finally reversed the charge – twice. Now my balance is -$29.!

I do no believe this was an honest mistake so watch out when gettig a “no fee” card from Wells Fargo Bank or any other bank.

I has AAA Auto insutance for 4 years from 2002 to 2005. Usually you would think an insurance company would want a customer’s business but not these guys. Never had an accident, never was late on any payment, but they decided to silently cancel my auto insurance.

I pay by the year and normally whenever my policy comes due I get a notification by phone or a call by an agent who says, “hey Marc, you’re insurance is due. Want to buy another year?” And I say sure and give them my credit card number. Easy mony for them you would think, but no. They don’t call, they just canceled me leaving me without insurance for 5 months.

Luckilly I wasn’t pulled over, had an accident, or had my car stolen. Had anything happened I would have been totally screwed. They put me at extreme risk without even a call. I have not points on my drivers license and never made a claim. I was a pure profit customer.

After spending over an hour on the phone getting transferred everywhere and talking to morons they said the cancelled me because my AAA membership dues weren’t paid, something else I had given them a credit card for and they didn’t renew. And they said that I didn’t send them back some form they send me about some ex-roommate I was living with about her driving my car. But that was over a year ago and she’s not living with me anymore and quite frankly it’s none of their god damn business who I’m living with and who else might drive my car. I thpught it was rather Nazi of them to expect that I have to get their permission as to who I might loan my car to.

So – I went online and got a Geico policy because I needed immediate coverage and I’m definitely not doing business with those nazi AAA Auto Insurance bastards again. So if you feel link I do, tell AAA to go fuck themselves. And let them know that I sent you.

I finally found a solution that was a one like patch that fixed the problem. I am however concerned that the folks at Clam AV are not taking it seriously and have yet to offer an official fix. I don’t think they get it that reliability is important.

To fic the problem go to the file:

libclamav/zziplib/zzip-zip.c

After the lines:

#include sys/stat.h
#include unistd.h

Add this line and recompile.

#include “others.h”

http://bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=84509

What happened was that last week a customer at his data center got hacked into and the hacker started sending PayPal fraud spam. Nectartech shut the server down and fixed the problem however GoDaddy who was the registrar for nectartech.com shut down the domin of the data center. That not only killed their domain cutting them off from their customers since all email went away, but all the domain names that used nectartech name servers went offline as well. Fortunately I run my own name servers and my domains were not affected.

These people at GoDaddy are serious morons and there tech support is somewhat less that 24×7. I have better support than this and I’m a one man operation. This registrar shuts down an entire data center over one machine being hacked. I don’t use GoDaddy myself, and I sure as hell wouldn’t recommend them to anyone. If you don’t want the risk of being arbetrarilly shut down, I’d use someone else

Here are 2 actual phone calls to GoDaddy support.. The first is a phone call at midnight. to try to get them to turn the data center back on. The second call was made the next morning after there 24×7 abuse department came to work.

The bottom line is – do you want your domains in the hands of people like this?