More hassles with the bank

Wow it's been a while. I made it back to Paris on Friday afternoon with no hassle at all. I guess the gods of air travel decided that I had paid my dues on the way over, since I ended up spending in total 8 hours at CDG, from the moment I got off the train at the airport to the moment the plane took off. That beats my previous record, set in April 2006, when I spent 7 hours in Raleigh, haha. I think # 3 on that list of Airports Kathryn Has Spent Too Much Time is a 6-hour delay at O'Hare, then Raleigh comes back at #4 with a 5-hour delay. Then I think Philly is #5, when I spent more time waiting for a flight to Detroit than it actually took to fly there. Oh, and back to a few weeks ago, I think if you tally it all up door to door from my dorm here to home in Collegeville, I was traveling for 19 hours. So after all that, I was relieved to have a smooth flight back!

The first order of business was to go pick up my new ATM card at the bank! Woohoo! And, beyond that, I even had two other important things: 1) the PIN so I can use the card, and 2) a paycheck from a project I've been working on with my one committee member here in France. Yessssss. And the paycheck was nearly double what I was expecting, which is ALWAYS good news! Word.

So I was feeling pretty smug about all of my banking success, until I opened a letter I had received from my insurance company here in France (the ENS makes us take out insurance on our rooms). I had to go through all sorts of hassle to write them a check in December...and it turns out that I was in such a hurry that I sent them the wrong thing. I wasn't paying close enough attention to what I was doing and I sent them one of these special deposit tickets that come in our checkbooks here. I think I mentioned the complicated procedure that is required to deposit checks here...part of that involves using this special slip that comes in the checkbooks and looks reasonably similar to checks. And being the ignorant (or absent-minded?) foreigner that I am, I wasn't paying close enough attention and sent them the wrong thing. Granted they have slightly different formats in terms of where you write stuff, but because I'm still pretty unfamiliar with both systems, it didn't strike me as out of the ordinary since I don't really know what I'm doing in either case. Writing a check or depositing one...it's all Greek to me when you get right down to it, haha. So yeah, I was a dumbass and sent them a deposit slip rather than a real check, and it took me THREE DAYS to figure it out. I got the thing back in the mail and didn't get why they had sent it back. I pondered it for a few days (thinking that perhaps they had wanted a cashier's check, but I checked with friends who said that no, their checks were accepted just fine...). Then today I was going to call and ask, and just as I was about to pick up the phone I figured it out, haha. So at least I didn't make an idiot of myself even further by calling!!!

So there you have it...now I have my ATM card and PIN, I've deposited my paycheck, AND I've written a new check to my insurance company!

Now about that dissertation I'm supposed to be writing...