Kate Griffin

Solidarity with the hunger strikers.

It is an egregious violation for them to be held on remand - without trial or conviction.

All for protesting against a genocide. Shameful.

This reflects the way a lot of monolingual Anglophones think about bilingualism, however. They can imagine speaking one language fluently and knowing a bit of some others, but cannot really understand that many of us are actually *fluent* or indeed are *native speakers* of more than one language.

Re-posting with alt text because the post accompanying this is obviously wrong, it's clearly a picture of a woman on a Crosscountry train having found a place to sit on the floor and read, her coffee cup beside her, folks queuing for the loo behind her

I have multiple shared birthdays in my family (two sets of twins plus coincidences) and the card blocking often happens when I've bought birthday gifts for two different people in one day.

Syniad gwych!

Long shot, but does anyone in Switzerland have an emergency Theremin to loan tomorrow night ( Friday 12 December )?
#ViaMardot is playing a show in St Gallen, and the airline lost her equipment!!!

We can help pay for a courier if needed, please share to get this message out!!
#theremin #switzerland

I mean it would be funny to see how long he could keep the lie going but you do know they'll immediately ask what school the fictional kids go to, right?

"but if buying two birthday gifts on the same day gets your card blocked, what about when you're doing Christmas shopping that requires multiple gifts?"

Christmas shopping IRL and doing contactless more than twice in a day is a trigger for a freeze, but usually it's fixable by doing chip & PIN.

I would *love* to know what it is that's triggering this treatment. I've had "buying too much" as an explanation. I have two sets of twins in my family, which has meant it's normal for me to buy two gifts on the same day, twice a year. That often triggers a block, so I have to stagger it.

Sometimes I try to pay with contactless and it declines it and then I can pay with chip & PIN. But I pay with chip & PIN waaaaaaay more than most people because I'm clinging superstitiously to the idea that it helps to reduce the itch my bank clearly has to keep blocking my card.

The thing is, this sort of discovery is really common in investigations because you have to be really familiar with a process to effectively trick it.

My favourite example? I was doing an investigation into fraudulent invoicing and went down to the records room to look for potential invoices.

"You need to use chip & PIN every now and then."
"But that doesn't work either, because you've blocked my card."
"Yes, but when you *do* use it, you should use chip & PIN sometimes."
"So if I use chip & PIN for every purchase will you stop blocking my card?"
"Oh no, we can't promise that."

A couple of years ago I was so burned out on my card getting blocked all the time, I just stopped trying to use it. Didn't touch it for six months.

Finally got round to ringing the bank and a smug lady said I'd been "using contactless too much". ZERO TIMES IN SIX MONTHS IS TOO MUCH?

I don't think I'm stupid, but I've never been able to see a pattern around why my bank blocks my credit card. Whether that's declining a one-off transaction or putting me through the full-on crapola of replacing the whole card. It seems totally random, so I feel helpless to predict/prevent it!

My new credit card has arrived and I'm supposed to activate it but the website says there's nothing to activate.

Tried to use it in the post office: declined.

Now been on the phone to HSBC for long enough to germinate cress.

Also is it annoying if your birthday is like the 21st and you start getting cards on the 10th because people are trying to beat the Christmas post?

I'm just going to ignore it and not give them any more money and hope they don't contact me about it again!

"Your recurring donation to us has failed because of bank crap you didn't cause."
"OK, my new card arrived today and it works! Can I give you the details?"
"lol no you need to set up an account with us to change stuff, even though you didn't need one to start giving us money in the first place."

From my POV, it's acceptable to send Xmas cards from the start of Advent onwards. So if my birthday was 20th Dec I'd be fine with getting an Xmas card a few weeks *before* my birthday.

But I am well aware that most people with Dec bdays have a thing of "Xmas doesn't start until after my birthday".

Do I have any followers with mid to late December birthdays?

Please advise me: is it annoying when a Christmas card from someone arrives before, or alongside, their birthday card to you?

Also: is it annoying to see a Christmas stamp on your birthday card? I think that would annoy me. #etiquette

At the weekend I started googling interactive Lewis Carroll exhibitions, and I ended up going down a massive rabbit hole.

People will (continue to) die of flu this winter and the NHS will be stretched even further.

You can't stop that on your own but, by preventing transmission and normalising mitigations, you can limit pressure on services and literally save lives.

Ahhhhhh that's a blast from the past!!!

My self-employment software keeps telling me there's a discrepancy between what money it thinks I have and what money my bank thinks it has and I'm like...sort it out between yourselves, lads, I don't care

Enjoy!!

Just replying to my own message to say I have worked out a way to do it now - the "dragging" thing does work but I had to use a different technique from normal.

I have now worked out that you can kind of drag the border to get rid of it but not using the first couple of techniques I tried!

Just started using my personal Trello again for the first time in a few years and there's a dirty great Inbox thingy taking up the screen so I can't see the full boards any more. Is there a way to remove Inbox in the free version? I've found messageboard answers but they don't seem to apply.

Remember when Corbyn promised a Brexit referendum in his manifesto and then made it happen sooner than it needed to and then put lies on buses while campaigning for Brexit and then unnecessarily triggered Article 50 and then messed up the negotiations 😡 So glad he's not Prime Minister any more!

Still dealing with the fallout of my bank deciding to replace my credit card without telling me or indeed actually replacing it.

On the bright side, my credit card bill for January is going to be tiny.