Bank of America - Unending Problems

Bank of America - Unending Problems

I don't like to write negative stuff and bring my readers down, but sometimes when my outrage is too high, I have to get it off my chest. I believe this post is in the public interest, so I decided to publish it. It's about my experiences with the worst bank I have ever used, Bank of America.

Many years ago I opened my very first business banking account for the very first small-business I ever held. I chose to use Bank of America, at the time they had a nice deal for small business accounts (I forget the details). I was happy to open a personal savings, personal checking, and business checking account with them.

I mean, a bank is a bank, right? They assign you an account number, which you use to identify your account with their bank. You can deposit money in and withdraw money out of your account, with that number.

You get a bunch of printed checks - you can fill one out, sign it, and hand it to someone as payment; when they take it to any bank, they can transfer the money from your account to theirs. You also get a debit-card, with which you can perform credit-card transactions to pay people, or debit-transactions to withdraw money. All banks and credit-unions are the same in this respect.

Every month, the bank mails you a statement of all activity that went on with your account. This helps you balance your checkbook, keep track of deposits and withdrawls, and verify there's no fraud going on - every withdrawl listed is something you expected.

All fine and dandy. Until the month after I moved.

Then the Problems Began

I moved, so I had a new street address. I went to the bank and gave my new address to the overly cheerful BofA teller. She joyfully typed it into the computer. But at the end of the month, I didn't get my statement in the mail.

This is weird, especially considering I forwarded my mail at the post office from the old address to the new one, and I had already been receiving some mail that had been redirected from the old address to my new place.

When I went to the bank to ask about it, a different (but equally ecstaticly overjoyed) teller said it had been mailed, she didn't know why I didn't get it in the mail. "Would you like a copy of the statement right now?" she smilingly asked. I said Yes. "Should I deduct the $8.00 fee from your account?" WHAT? $8 to print a 1-page statement for my tiny business that's not profitable yet? Yep, for business banking that is the cost (price accurate as of the time this occurred, probably 12 years ago). OK, whatever, I paid it because I just wanted my statement.

I had her re-enter my new address, which she was completely happy to do.

Next month - no statement.

Each time I'd ask at the bank, I got lots of excuses about time-delays updating the database, and assurances that it was fixed now.

Each month my statement didn't come.

Each month I went to the bank in person, and spent $8 to get my statement printed out.

I checked with the post office again, nothing wrong at their end.

This went on for about 4 months. I made phone calls to various departments at the bank, all to no avail. Everybody either told me "it looks like the right address is already in the computer," or "it will take 30-60 days for the change to take affect."

Now, I am a programmer and database designer by trade. You can't tell me it will take 30 days for data to be updated in a database. What the hell kind of database takes that long?!?

Oh sure, maybe there are multiple databases tied together, far, far apart. Using standard networking technologies today, why would that take more than 30 seconds to copy data between servers located around the world? From what I understand, banks don't use the Internet to transfer data internally, they use direct-connect lines that are even faster than the Internet.

Let's look at it another way. When I opened my account, I gave them my address only once. It went into the first database just fine. It was distributed to all the other databases that needed it in less than 30 days. I know this because I received my very first statement in the mail within 30 days of opening the account! So why should it take more than 30 days to re-distribute my new address to the same servers using the same distribution method? How can that be?!?

I wasn't receiving the statements, which means it was not being sent to either the old or new address, from what I can tell. How is that? If postal mail is stamped "do not forward," which many banks do, that's their feedback-loop to know when the address they have for a customer is no longer the best one. This way they can obtain the new address. Maybe BofA uses that technique; I don't know. If they do, they should have received the bounced statement, corrected their database, and re-sent the statement to the new address. That would result in a delay, from my viewpoint, but I would eventually have received it.

Let's suppose they do it wrong, and correcting the database does not result in re-sending the statement. I would have "lost" the first statement, then received the very next month's statement at my new address. I would then have only missed 1 statement, not 4 in a row.

Shouldn't a bank have the best technology available, to provide the best service to their customers? Don't banks value the accuracy of data, don't they want to keep it current? Don't banks MAKE MONEY based on accurate data, being a financial business and all? Can't they spend a little of that money upgrading their computers to perform properly for however many accounts they have in however many states they exist in, in the United States? If my home Linux-server-and-database, which costs less than $1000 to build, can exchange data quickly with other systems in under 1 minute, why can't a big bank mainframe do it?

That Was the End of That

After about 4 months of paying $8 for a replacement statement, I couldn't take it any longer. I went into BofA and closed all my accounts there. I moved everything to a new upstart bank named Compass Bank which promised Free Checking, even for business accounts. That was new and amazing at the time; since then most banks have adopted this policy, but Compass started it all. I do not work for Compass, I'm just a happy customer of theirs. And I'm sure there's other banks equally good out there today.

Fast Forward To Today

Why am I writing about painful old banking memories right now? Because the were all stirred up by my visit to BofA today.

I didn't want to visit BofA today, but I had to. I needed to send some money to someone I know who has an account there. The fastest way to transfer money between banks is NOT electronic (strangely enough). It's faster to drive to bank #1 and withdraw cash, then drive to bank #2 and deposit the cash. I won't write any more about how completely stupid this is in the year 2008 - that I have to physically visit both banks to perform a high-speed money transfer - I'll save that for another day.

So, after withdrawing some money from the first bank, I drive over to BofA and walk straight over to the little writing table with deposit slips on it. There isn't just 1 kind of deposit slip, oh no. There's 2 kinds: one for local deposits, and one for out of state deposits. What? I have to know what state they're in? I have their account number and the routing number, that should be all I need.

I start filling in the out-of-state deposit slip, because I know the person lives in Texas.
There's little boxes for nearly every state in the USA - separate box for each state - I'm supposed to mark what state they're in. This section literally uses up the upper 1/4 of the form.

I fill in the account number, person's name and the date, but don't get any further.

The teller lady at the front isn't helping anyone at the moment so she calls me over, which ordinarily would be annoying (if I knew what I was doing, I'd want to be left alone until I finished writing my deposit slip). So I went over to her counter and gave her the money to deposit, and the deposit slip, as she's smiling a big smile at me.

"What state was the account created in?" she asks me cheerfully after glancing at the form.

"I have no idea what state the account was created in. It's not my account. I'm trying to deposit money in someone else's account. The person lives in Texas," I reply.

She types on the computer and puts a mark in the "Georgia" box on the form (which I would never have guessed), and says, "what's the birthday of the person on the account?" What? What's their birthday? How am I supposed to know that?

I tell her, "I don't know, July something. I shouldn't have to know their birthday to put money in their account."

I imagine she was asking that for verification reasons, to make sure I didn't give her the wrong account number. It's easy to mis-read or mis-write numbers - we don't want the money going in the wrong account! But isn't the full name of the person enough verification? I wrote their full name on the deposit slip. This person's name is so unique, there surely is nobody else in the entire USA with the same name; nor, possibly, in the world.

I say to her, "I have the routing number and the account number. That should be enough to uniquely identify the right account." She says, "we're not doing a wire transfer, so I don't need the routing number." I say, "OK, so the account number is all you need to deposit this money."

"That and the state they created the account in," she adds. "See here, at the top of the deposit slip, you can check the box of which state the account was created in... unless your friend doesn't want you to know that," and she puts away the deposit slip.

At this point, just as she's handing me my deposit receipt, I can't take it any longer.

"Look," I say, "you just told me the account number is all you need." "Yes," she says, "we can look up the state for you from the account number." I say, "no other bank I've ever used has ever asked me what state the account is created in, nor should they ever have to. They never ask me the birthday of the person holding the account. The account number has all the info you need. Please tell your management to stop asking people what state the account was created in, because you don't need to ask that question. Do not make your customers do more work than they have to. If you can look it up, then you should always look it up, and stop asking. Please tell your manager to print new deposit slips that don't have little boxes for every state in the union on the top; it's completely unnecessary and confusing and frustrating for your customers."

"OK, thanks," she said, with a worried look on her face, at which time I turned and walked out.

I've been around long enough to know how businesses work. She'll probably gossip to her coworkers about that weird customer, to relieve the pain she felt from our conversation. I never intend to cause pain for anyone, in my life; but sometimes its unavoidable. There's probably a 10% chance she'll actually mention my suggestions to her boss. There's absolutely no chance that her boss will do anything about it, or if s/he does, there's no chance their higher-ups will actually listen and respond. I know this bank will never change their deposit slips, at least, not as a result of my efforts today. Only if a VP high up the chain makes it a new policy corporate-wide, will the deposit slips change.

My Conclusion

BofA has serious issues (many of them) which cause their customers lots of pain and agony. Their policy of how they deal with this has always been "be more friendly and smiley," rather than actually fixing the problems. This makes me doubly-angry when I detect it. And I always sense it with this bank. Why fix the problems when you can just sweet-talk your customers more? After all, PR is more important than quality, right? At least, in my experience, this has been BofA's underlying policy for the past 15 years, at all branches I have ever visited in Arizona - and it really pisses me off.

Do you use Bank of America? You're welcome to, if you want. I'm sure many people have had acceptable experiences with it, or the bank wouldn't exist today.

But I'm sticking to my promise: I will never hold any BofA account again for as long as I live. They don't deserve my money ever again.

OK, I feel better now.

Strange Car Tire Day

Tuesday was a very strange day. I dropped one of our cars off at the shop for new tires. Originally they thought it would take 20 minutes, so I planned on waiting for it, but by the time I got there at 2PM they estimated a 2 hour wait, so I walked home. It's about 2 miles, which isn't too bad.

On my way home I reached the major street intersection between the car shop and my house, and noticed thousands of nails in the road, this weird kind with a blue plastic ring on each one, causing most of them to stand with the point facing straight up! It was a nightmare of tire-popping evilness covering perhaps a 30 square foot diameter from the empty cardboard box that must have fallen out of the back of some contractor's pickup truck. This mess covered about a lane and a half of this 3-lane-each-way road.

As the only pedestrian in sight, I felt a special duty to help pick these things up. I would NEVER want to drive my car over such as mess; how could your tires not pick up at least 3 or 4 of those? How long had this been here, with people driving over it? (It looked fairly recent to me).

There was no way I could pick all these up in my hands and throw them to the side of the road; it would take an hour or more. Looking around quickly I spotted one of those home-made signs on a wooden stake, "make money fast, with realestate!" or something. These signs are everywhere, and technically they're illegal, but nobody ever does anything about it.

I grabbed the sign and yanked it out of the ground - looks like a good shovel to me!

So I started shovelling mounds of these nails as fast as I could, in between sets of traffic trying to drive by; waving oncoming traffic in my lane over to the next lane, so they wouldn't run over them any longer.

It took about 3 light-changes to get the vast majority of the nails scooped onto the side of the road. Of course, some of the nails (pointing down) had been driven into the asphalt, and wouldn't shovel very well. I kept scooping at them with my makeshift shovel, but a few just wouldn't budge.

I kept hoping a police car would stop and help out, they're usually good for things like this, but none ever came by. From the 110 degree heat, I was feeling weak and a little sun-stroked (this happens quickly in Phoenix AZ), so I figured what I had done was good enough; there couldn't be more than 5 or 6 of these damn little things in the street anymore. I stumbled through the intersection over to the nearby Bashas to get a bottle of water and an iced coffee.

After that I walked home.

Now it's 4PM. I call the car shop, but since one of their employees just quit earlier that day, they're a little back-logged, our car had just gone up on the rack for the tire change. "Should be done in 20 minutes," the guy assured me, which I knew meant 45 minutes. You know how that works.

But I had a problem - I needed to be somewhere at 4:30, and it will take 10 mins to get there, and my wife and I only had 1 car left at home. She agreed to be dropped off at the shop and wait for our other car to be finished. So I dropped her off, and went to my appointment. Everything worked out - or so it seemed.

The next morning I go out to the garage for something, and notice one of the front tires of our brand-new-tire-car seemed a bit low. "That's odd, maybe they didn't seat the tire properly," I thought. I had instructed them to put the 2 new tires on the front of the car.

Then I looked at the top of the low tire, and what did I see --

There was a nail plunged cleanly straight into the tire; the blue plastic ring was flush with the outside tread.

Yes, my wife had driven back the same way I had walked, through the "evil nails intersection", and somehow picked up one of those nails, even though I had scooped every one I could out of the way, two and a half hours earlier!

What are the odds of that?

The only good news is, they guys at the shop screwed up and put the new tires on the back of the car, not the front. The nail had punctured one of our old tires. That was a relief to hear, that we didn't puncture a brand new tire 2 hours after purchasing it; the bad news of course, it cost a little money to get the puncture fixed on a non-warranty tire.

So, I guess you could say I picked up 1000 nails out of the road, that day; but my wife - she picked up the last one.

The Best Mailing List Manager

I've been using an email Autoresponder for some time now, which is the most awesome mailing list management system I've ever seen. It has all the features I've always wanted and more. It's web-based and very easy to use.

It's the Aweber Autoresponder System. Once you subscribe, you can set up as many different mailing lists (autoresponders) as you want. My favorite feature is the ability to schedule emails to go out at aspecific time and day in the future! I can "queue up" a bunch of messages and have them sent one-per-week if I want. I can log in at any time and edit the ones that haven't gone out yet, see when my "queue" is going to run out, and schedule new ones.
I put a link on my web site to encourage people to join the list - and I can send a link in email, to people I know who would enjoy the lists.

You can compose messages in graphical-format or text-format on the web site, or you can do what I do - compose them with your own system (a macro-to-HTML language I invented, in my case), and then cut-n-paste the HTML right into the message window. I put both HTML and text in my messages, for people with older mail-readers - in case they can't receive rich media messages (or choose not to).

Anyway, it's a great system - if you've ever considered maintaining a mailing list of highly-qualified individuals for your business, you should check out Aweber.

You don't have to commit right away - sign up for their free demo first:

AWeber Demo

Read More about Unlimited Autoresponders

My son found a really fun game that's free on the Internet - Disney's Pirates Online (www.piratesonline.com). It follows roughly the story line of Pirates of the Carribbean, the movie trilogy. My family's been playing it for 3 days now, it's so much fun.

You can create an account for free, and play the story line, up to a certain point.
You have to download and install an application, which talks over the Internet to the game. The installation takes a while, but downloading all the basic data for the islands and seas and characters takes a REALLY LONG time, the first time you start playing. I'd say from beginning install to actually being able to run around in the game for the first time, it probably took 20 minutes or more.

You start out a beginner pirate, and have to perform various tasks for various people around the town you start in, and are awarded various things including a pistol. You learn how to sail a ship (you start with a sloop), and can fight the Navy ships on the high seas.

There are many things that makes this game so much fun. First, you are free to wander anywhere in the world, or over the seas, to various islands like Tortuga, Port Royal, and many others. Other players cannot directly hurt you, so there's none of the "kill the noob" attitude in this game. If you die, you end up "in jail", and have to kick your way out. You don't lose the stuff you're carrying when you die, and there's no limit to how many times you can die.

Second, this is a MMORPG - you can see many other real players running around doing things too. You can become "friends" with them, and if they accept, then you can:
* whisper to them (private chat)
* teleport to them, anywhere in the world
* join their "crew" - sail on their ship with them.

When you're sailing in a ship, there are different roles that you can play. On the basic sloop, you can steer the ship, or man the left or right cannons. (If you're all alone, you'll want to sail the ship - you can still fire broadside cannons left and right). But the best thing is when you have 2 other "crewmates" on your ship - you can steer, and they can fire the extra cannons left and right, to terrorize the Navy sea ships!

Not only can you blast away at the enemy, you can even board them (by firing grappling hooks at them once you've weakened their ship to a certain point), and battle on board their ship with swords - if you defeat them, you swing on ropes back to your own ship, and theirs sinks. You get lots of booty from their ship that way.

The more you practice with sword, gun, and cannon, the better your skill level becomes, over time. You do more damage, and can focus your skill building on whichever skills you want, within that type. There are combination attacks, which you can become good at with practice.

All the ships and people in the game have their names printed above their heads, and colors are used to indicate extra information. Enemy NPCs have their skill level displayed overhead too, so you can avoid ones that would completely kick your butt if you attacked them. Enemy ships show what kind of ship they are, and their origin (Navy, East India Trading Co, or other players). The font size is smaller the further away they are - Disney did a really good job with how this all works.

There are enough people playing this game that there are many servers now - after logging in, you should choose the same server as your friends, so you can see them in the game. A server is simply a computer that's up 24 hours a day, on a high-speed Internet connection. One server computer, and the Internet connection it's on, can only handle so many players at one time. Besides, your computer has limits, too, of how many players you can practically track and display on the screen; more than a certain number and it will start lagging really bad.

Which brings me to some of the downsides if this exciting game. Lag, being the biggest one. If you're using wireless, make sure you have a strong connection, and that the connection is not broken from time to time - that completely kicks you out of the game, which is frustrating, especially if you're in the middle of a battle on the high-seas with your crew - you person disappears, and they have to make due without you until you can get back online!

There are a number of bugs in this fairly new game, however all the bugs I've seen are fairly harmless. There are some out of control flames, that appear randomly in different spots on one of the islands. Sometimes you see them burning in the middle of the sandy beach, or partly out in the ocean. Other times they're in the center of a building, on a table in the pub, etc.! Luckily the flames don't harm you or anything, they're just there looking strangely out of place.

Another bug is really an interaction between Windows and the game controls. One of the most important controls is SPACEBAR, which is how you open doors, search crates, dig in the ground, kick the bars of your jail cell, etc. If you ever press SPACEBAR 5 times in a row, Windows thinks you're trying to invoke Handicapped Mode, and temporarily suspends your full-screen game to tell you that you've just turned on this special mode! You have to click "cancel" to go back to the game.

Once in a while the executable application of the game will crash, and kick you back out to Windows, completely exiting the game. This rarely happens on my laptop, but always seems to happen on my wife's machine about every 15 mins or so. We're both running WinXP.

But overall, the game is totally worth playing. It really sucks you in, and when you start hitting the limits of the storyline for free players, it makes you want to pay for the full version of the game. You cannot upgrade to better ships until you pay for the game. You also can't have certain special weapons (and even voodoo), until you pay for the game. With a sloop you can only have 3 people on board - my family has 4 members, and this causes us to want to upgrade, just so we can get a better ship that can fit all 4 of us on the high seas. We'll probably subscribe 1 or 2 of us pretty soon.

The music and sound effects really set the mood, too, and aren't at all irritating with repetition like many other games I won't mention.

If you enjoyed any of the Pirates of the Carribbean movies at all, for any reason, I highly recommend downloading and playing this game. My whole family is playing it this weekend. It's a blast.

My father-in-law's Hyundai Elantra's headlights were pointing down too low, and he asked me to adjust them when he was visiting our house last night.

My father-in-law came to visit us last night. He mentioned his Hyundai Elantra's headlights were pointing down too low, and he asked if I could adjust them for him. So I got the manual out of his glove compartment and found the section on headlight adjusting.

The instructions say to look for a hole in the top of the radiator-area near each light, you can supposedly put a phillips screwdriver in there and twist to adjust the vertical alignment of the headlight. I tried it, but it wouldn't work. So I shined a flashlight down in the hole, and I could see what they were doing.

There's a little gear-like thing that's supposed to mesh with the phillips screwdriver prongs, so that when you twist, it rolls the gear, which adjusts the headlight. Well, it doesn't work. I tried a variety of bigger and smaller phillips screwdrivers, no luck. I even tried a very thin standard screwdriver, trying to "flick the teeth" of the gear down in there, that didn't work either.

I have adjusted headlights in other cars before, and the way you usually do it is go in behind the headlight (as if you're going to change the bulb), and look for some kind of thing to twist as an adjustment. So I looked down in back of where I had been trying to adjust the headlights, and there it was! The normal headlight adjustment!

It's recessed somewhat, so you have to use a thin-standard screwdriver on it. You can completely bypass that whole weird gear-thingy, and directly adjust the thing which raises and lowers the angle of the headlight.

The one on the right-side is harder to access because the battery's over there, and there's a plastic cover covering the whole area. The little plastic connectors holding that cover in place simply pop off, when you pull up on the cover, so you can re-attach them again when you're finished. (It feels like a cheap design, one of the plastic connectors broke off when I did this, so be careful).

The rest of the instructions were somewhat accurate, about trying to adjust the height of the projected light to the same height as the lights are physically installed on the car itself. I could not understand their instructions for horizontal alignment, but it already looked good to me, so I left that alone.

Wrapping Presents - When the Paper is Too Small

Here's a trick most people don't know about. What can you do when you're wrapping a rectangular present with the last scrap of wrapping paper, which is (of course) too small?

Here's the trick: rotate the object you're wrapping and try folding the paper diagonally. This makes better use of the wrapping paper (less waste - less paper overlapping other paper), so it often works.











Voila!

Getting Over My Allergies

Since the age of 2 I've had a number of food allergies, including being allergic to beans. All kinds of beans. If I ate some beans (with or without knowing it), my throat would swell up and feel scratchy and very uncomfortable; I would get a weird pressure in my esophagus and stomach, and feel itchy all over - for many hours, usually for the rest of the day. I would feel drained of energy; like with an illness; often accompanied by a faster heart-rate.

No doctors of any kind have ever been able to make an impact on my food allergies. My parents tried everything when I was a child, and as an adult, I had pretty much given up on finding a cure for it.

Until 3 weeks ago.

Something in me just felt like it was the END of my beans allergy. I'd had enough, I was sick of it, and now I was going to fix it once and for all. It was just a very strong feeling I had, like a strong motivation to do something, without knowing what specifically to do.

So I started searching on the Internet: beans allergy, food allergy, allergy cure, allergy healing, nuts allergy, peanut allergy... and I found plenty of articles talking about people with the same problems I have, and also many medical lectures about all the specific details of what your body goes thru when you have an allergy. Medical researchers are really good at labeling things, without actually being capable of fixing them. I skipped thru all of that crap and kept looking.

And then I found it. Some guy's blog describing his experience with EXACTLY about the type of allergies I had, to beans and nuts. It sounded like his were slightly worse than mine though, which was good. He nearly died from eating a peanut; I have been close to calling 911 from eating peanuts, but wasn't necessarily close to dying. (Peanut allergies can be more extreme than most people would imagine).

Then he explained what he did to cure his allergy! He did it himself, with some exercises called "TAT" that he learned about on the web! I couldn't believe it - someone found a solution? One that's completely free, that you can do yourself?!? It sounded WAY too good to be true. He wasn't trying to sell me anything on his web page, which told me I was on to something. At the end of his article he pointed to a web site called TAT Life.

I went to the TAT Life web site. The instructions were right there, a free PDF file to download and print out. It seemed simple. It seemed crazy. You hold your fingers on your head in a certain way, think of certain things, say some other things, and that's it. 10 minutes, tops. It couldn't work, could it? Something in me was excited about this and wanted to try it, even though my brain was saying "no way".

Then I noticed something fascinating in the instructions. The very first thing you should work on (if you haven't done TAT before) is the sentence "TAT is too easy to work or be of any value." I thought that was really cool - a system that understands where I'm coming from, and even integrates that into the program? I was ready to give it a try.


So I sat on the side of my bed with the doors and windows closed, I wasn't about to let anyone see me do this. I went thru the exercises with my printout on my lap. I could recall a time when I was a child that my parents forced me to eat a nut when I didn't want to, I was screaming and crying. I didn't dwell on the event, just tried to see it remotely from a distance, to that little child so long ago. The exercise really felt good, inside of me, while I was doing it. I even felt elated afterwards. But I wasn't about to try eating any beans any time soon. The web site mentioned it's a good idea to drink extra water when doing these exercises, so I did. Living in Arizona you have to force yourself to drink extra water anyway; it's so dry, and hot in the summer time.

About 2 days later I decided to do the exercise again, focusing on Beans. I did everything the same way as before. Same feeling of elation afterwards.

Then about a week later my wife made some chili. She always puts beans in it. She and our kids can eat beans just fine, I'm the only one with a problem. She usually puts aside some of it right before adding the beans, just for me. I told her not to do that, just make it with beans, because I think I don't have an allergy anymore. She looked at me funny, but I could tell somehow that I didn't feel reviled by the sight or thought of beans anymore.


At dinner time, I took a couple bites, man was it delicious. My wife, watching me carefully, said sarcastically, "I'll go get the Benadryl." I ate some other foods on my plate for a few minutes waiting for any reaction - but there wasn't any! I finished my entire bowl of chili - it was unbelivably delicious, I had never tasted anything like it before. No reaction whatsoever.

I was cured!

Well, I've eaten a lot of beans since then. Green beans are wonderful. I found out I don't like refried beans very much, but black-beans are pretty good.

Think about this now: 40 years worth of beans allergy - gone after 2 treatments.
No doctor could cure me - I had to cure myself.

I'd like to mention, though, after all that I was still allergic to Sesame Seeds and Peanuts.
I had to do 2 other treatments specifically focused on Sesame Seeds to cure myself of that allergy (apparently rooted in a different painful experience than beans). And I am still working on the Peanuts one.

I'm serious about all this. This really is my experience, it's almost too good to be true.

If you have any allergies that you are sick of living with, check out TAT - I highly recommend it. http://www.tatlife.net/
After all, at no cost, what do you have to lose?