Wallpaper, the guiltiest of guilty-pleasure magazines, pays homage to the tart card in their new issue. The calling cards, stuck in phone booths by London prostitutes advertising their wares, have gained something of a cult appeal over the years, particularly as phone booths are on the wane. So the magazine asked a boatload of designers to come up with their own cards, with the added design-nerd twist that each one is hawking a different typeface.
Some of them are funny, some are sort of clever, and as usual I feel like there’s something really fundamental that I’m just not getting about the stylings of Daisy de Villeneuve. The whole thing would be sort of entertaining, in a dorky way, if the sidebar didn’t suggest that every single London prostitute is being trafficked against her will.
Designer Mike Dempsey, who works with trafficked women in London, wrote a response to the project, and I honestly can’t say that I know enough about the lives of London’s sex workers to judge what he’s saying. However, I’m guessing it might be an exaggeration on Wallpaper’s part to say the whole project evokes “the sinister world that lies beneath every card.” (Also, if they’re going to look at every woman as a victim, then the whole project is pretty tasteless, isn’t it?)
[above: Jeff Leak's ode to Cooper Black]
The other issue I’ve got going on is that my roommate gave me his half of the rent with a money order. Being new to the world of check-like things that aren’t actually checks, I told him to make it out to me, thinking I could just cash it when I went to the bank yesterday. But it turns out that banks don’t let you do that unless you have enough money to cover it. You can deposit it, like a check, and then wait for it to clear, even though the whole point of money orders (I thought) is that they’re supposed to be just like cash. Since my landlord is sort of understandably pissy about the rent being a week late, I figured I’d just go to a 7-11 (where it came from) and cash it there.
Except that they don’t cash them. They just issue them. They’ll only cash them if they’re for less than $75. So then I went to another Western Union place, and I was told that they didn’t cash them either, and that I’d have to go to a check cashing place. I haven’t done that yet, because I’m pretty sure they charge a bunch of money for the service. Since I have more or less exactly the rent money, I can’t afford to give a chunk of it to a dodgy check-cashing place just because they’re the only option. I AM SO ANNOYED RIGHT NOW!!
Filed under: money (lack of) | Tags: rhode island, things that suck, unemployment
So, it’s been a while now since I’ve used the “money (lack of)” tag on any of my posts, and since I have spent most of the last 48 hours fretting over stupid things I figured I might as well share.
As you may or may not have gathered, I’m currently unemployed. Busy all the time, planning events and fundraisers out the wazoo, but not actually making any money doing it. (Also, I’m not pursuing the rentboy thing anymore, for personal/boyfriendal reasons.)
In Rhode Island, you get your weekly unemployment payments via a debit/Visa card, which makes it easy to get cash out of ATMs and track your payments and, though credit cards are evil, I’d rather do that than have to go to the bank and stand in line and wait twenty-four hours for checks to clear and everything.
There’s just one problem.
The cards are issued by Chase. And there are no Chase banks in Rhode Island. That means that every single time one of the sixty-eight thousand unemployed Rhode Islanders takes money out, they have to pay an ATM convenience fee. Even if each unemployed person takes all their money out in one lump sum, and assuming people will only pay $1.50 per charge (which is conservative these days), that’s about two hundred thousand dollars a week that the state forces people to pay in convenience charges. And that’s totally aside from the fact that it means the state is choosing to work exclusively with a bank that does no other business in the state. If, like me, you don’t want to walk around with large sums of cash, your fees add up pretty quickly. Unless you go to a Chase branch, I guess, but according to their website the nearest location would require an hour of driving plus two ferry rides.
And that’s just the first part of why I’m so annoyed today…
