Castle Magus

"Hi. Today we're looking at America's 40th president – Teflon Ron, 'ol Dutchy, the Gipper himself – Ronald Reagan, and how nearly everything bad in the U.S. today can be traced back to something he did and/or said."

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Okay, ignoring all the "pretending to get increasingly 'annoyed' by the 'joke' (i.e. the BttF clip) that we're choosing to run into the ground this time" thing and the really bizarre, ongoing "corn" thing (without which the video would probably be at least 10 minutes shorter), this was a pretty good video. And, hey, at least Warmbo wasn't in this one.

So yeah, Ronald Reagan was a shitty president and just a pretty shitty dude all around, too. Not quite to the nadir of Donald Trump, of course, but still pretty low down there. This isn't really news to anyone who has paid attention at all to the past 40 years. Basically, Reagan and his presidency and the effect it had on everything that came after are who and what made "President Trump" possible. I guess the real take away from this is that we should maybe never again elect a man with *onald in his first name for the job of President. Starting right now.

(Oh, and there's apparently going to be a "part 2" to this. Hmm.)

Hey look, it's yet another bullet point to add to the "Fuck Texas Forever" list.

So, a month or so ago, Wells Fargo stopped servicing my private student loan and transferred everything over to some company called Firstmark or whatever. Great, fine, whatever.

Except now, when I try to log into the Firstmark website, the thing just keeps auto-refreshing after a second or so, and before the page is fully loaded, meaning I cannot actually log in.

Well, as it turns out, the site apparently only works in ye olde Internet Explorer (which I'd highly prefer not to use at all, but will if there is no other alternative). In Firefox, Chrome, and the new Edge shit from Microsoft, the site does the infinite refresh dumbshit, but in IE it works just fine, apparently. Go figure.

So, like, I don't actually have a problem here, in so far as paying my bills or anything (well, aside from that fact that I still have student loan bills to pay at all, and will likely continue to do so for at least the next couple decades or so ¬_¬), since I pay on it through the NCSECU Bill Pay thing anyway. I just wanted to rant about the Firstmark website being broken. Until I tried using Internet Exploder, I wasn't able to actually view my Firstmark account online. There's something broken on their end, most likely, because the Firstmark website worked fine last month, and nothing has changed on my end. Also, I'm not the only one having this problem either.

You know, scammers, when you're leaving scammy voicemails on my cellphone like "Hey, this is <insert name here> calling about your student loans blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda" and it is the exact same scammy voice, the exact same scammy inflection, the exact same bored, scammy tone, and, indeed, almost the exact same scammy message, verbatim each time, with the only change being that the name you give is something completely different each time, that's a pretty big tell that you're a scammer. Just letting you know.

Here is an example (it's the exact same voice, inflection, tone, and message as the ones that I've gotten on my cellphone, but the name is always different each time).

I got my W2 at work today, so I decided to check https://www.myedaccount.com/ to see if my 1098E was ready. I logged in and, hey, there's apparently a message in my inbox! Nice. I opened my message inbox, and sure enough there's a message entitled "Your 1098E Form is available". Sweet. So, I opened the message and was greeted with the following:

"This message is still being processed and is not ready to view. If you have provided the Direct Loan Servicing Center with a valid e-mail address, you will receive a courtesy e-mail notification when this message is available.

Sincerely,

The Direct Loan Servicing Center"

What.

Why.

If there is any purpose whatsoever in putting a placeholder email into someone's inbox to be filled in later, I am sorry but I am not seeing it at all.

(EDIT)

I've found out that I can apparently just click the "Print My Tax Info" link on the main page. Well, if could get logged back in again, I would try that. Right now though, the site just isn't loading at all, even though it was loading fine just a few minutes ago.

(/EDIT)

On October 11, 2011, I mailed out an envelope to the Federal Direct Loans people, containing all of the forms necessary to make a change to the repayment plan on my consolidation loan. As of today, November 14, 2011, I have not yet received any sort of response to this at all.

On October 31, 2011, I sent them an email via their new website to which they have switched. As of today, November 14, 2011, I have not yet received any sort of response to this at all.

On November 9, 2011, I sent them another email, following up on the previous one, a response to which I never received, which was a follow up to the snail mail I had sent them, a response to which I never received. As of today, November 14, 2011, I have not yet received any sort of response to this at all.

Well, today, I finally decided to stop screwing around with email and just call them on the telephone directly. I called them. All I got was a recorded message saying, essentially, "Because we're still in the process of switching over to the new website, we're getting a lot of calls. As such, we're not going to actually take your call now but just play this lame recorded message. You should totally go try out our spiffy new website that hardly works at all."

So now, today, in light of the above, I have sent them a third email, which was essentially a slightly less angry sounding version of the above LJ post. At this point, I honestly don't expect to receive any sort of response to this one at all, either.

What a serious load of enraging crap.

It stopped snowing an hour or two before work ended, so that was no problem.

The bus being 10 minute early, just as before, was a problem, however. I thought that they'd straightened up their act, since for a while there, the bus had been coming relatively on time. But twice now in just the past week or so, the bus has been 10 minutes earlier than it was supposed to be (according to the Trip Planner), and had been coming 5 or more minutes earlier beyond that. I've sent in yet another complaint about it. There's not much else I can do, aside from rant about it here.

Also, on the student loans front, I think I was viciously attacked one final time from beyond the grave by AES. My sister (co-signer on my Wells Fargo consolidation loan) got a call from them today. She told me about it and I called them back at the number they'd given her. Why they hadn't tried to contact me first, rather than her is unknown to me (even though I asked the dude exactly that on the phone, and he just said that they were going to try me next but that I'd gotten to them first, which didn't actually answer my question, but whatever). Just before I called them, I opened my online account and took a look at it. Turns out my latest payment, due on Feb 27, was overdue, as it was never paid. Why that is, I have no idea, since I set it up to auto-draft way back in November, and until now that had been working fine. Guy on the phone had no idea why it stopped either, except for one thing: an overpayment that had been made to AES by Wells Fargo months ago had FINALLY been repaid to them on February 11, and was showing up as an additional payment on my account. Even though it should not have done so, this payment, for whatever reason, apparently caused my auto-draft setup to be canceled.

I'm being facetious when I say this is the fault of AES, of course, but... yeah. Given all of the other boondoggles to come out of AES, it morbidly amuses me to pretend that this was an intentional attack by them. At any rate, I'm glad to finally see the last of them. Assuming, that is, nothing gets screwed up with my Fed payments, though those seem to be fine now as well, as far as I can tell. There is, however, an overpayment from the Fed to AES which has been cleared from my AES account, but which has not yet shown up on my Fed account, so... I dunno. We'll see, I guess?

Aside from the fact that I don't really feel like dealing with this shit right now, being out sick from work turns out to have been something of a mixed blessing. By this I mean that I was at home in order to make some calls concerning American Education Services utterly dropping the ball yet again.

As you may recall, something or another got screwed up with my Consolidation Loan with Wells Fargo, and they paid at least $10,000 less than the amount needed to clean out my private loans with AES. At first, I wasn't sure if this was the fault of Wells Fargo or AES, but I'm more and more leaning toward it being a screw up on the part of AES. Well, I thought that I had finally gotten all of that fixed up. Meaning that I received an email from Wells Fargo saying that they had sent an additional payment to AES which should have more than covered the remaining amount in my four private loans with AES.

Well, guess what... AES still managed to make a mess of it. Instead of applying this amount ONLY to the four private loans, as was intended, they applied it to ALL of my loans, including the Federal Stafford loans, which were NOT meant to be included in that. Therefore, not only do I still have residual amounts in those damned private loans with AES, for which I am still being billed the full amount by them, meaning that I am still effectively on the hook for double the monthly payment for what is essentially the same loans, but now the amounts for my Stafford Loans are screwed up as well. This means that my still pending application with the Federal Direct Consolidation Loans people is in jeopardy of being improperly processed now as well, which is (or at least was and should have been) a different issue altogether.

I called AES a little bit ago. I was eventually told that my account would be handed over to their Financial Management department, and to call them back "next week sometime to see if it has been cleared up". I followed that call up with an email, basically restating what I had talked about on the phone.

I am quickly beginning to share owsf2000's hatred of student loan companies. So much incompetence. It boggles the mind.

(EDIT)

Since making this post, I've talked with both Wells Fargo and the Federal Direct Loan people.

As I expected would be the case before I even called them, there was nothing that could be done on Wells Fargo's end concerning the mix-up with AES, so that's pretty much that. But, AES suggested that I call Wells Fargo and make them aware of the situation, so that's what I did. Nothing gained, nothing lost.

For the Fed people, I think I actually made a bit of progress since last time. They had listed both Educaid/Wachovia and AES as my "previous lenders", so I had them to finally remove Educaid/Wachovia from that. The situation was that originally back in the days of 2004, my loans were obtained through Educaid. Then Wachovia bought out Educaid, apparently. And then, later, Wachovia handed all of my loans off to AES. So that's taken care of now, at least. I hope. I also made them aware that the potential for them to get the wrong numbers from AES was there. I was told basically that if this does happen, that if I receive the certification letter from them (the Fed people) and it is wrong, then I need to just cancel that loan application altogether and start the process all over again. *sigh* Well, that's better than nothing I suppose.

(/EDIT)