Iowa State has a high dollar deal with U.S. Bank that allows students to use their university id as a debit card. They have it set up such that, if you come to ISU, during your registration for classes, you automatically get routed into a line to sign up for a new U.S. bank debit card. And they make it seem like it is part of registering for ISU. A friend of mine called U.S. Bank about getting a loan. He asked them why he should get a loan from them if their rate wasn't that good. The service representative said, we have no reason to offer good rates, we make all of our money off of overdraft fees on college kids. Another friend of mine, over-drafted on accident. Each time she tried to use her debit card, for about 3 days, they charged her around $30. Her charges went up to over $500. We asked them why the card kept working if she was several hundred dollars in the negative, and the U.S. Bank employee replied, "We allow it to continue working to save the customer from the embarrassment of their card not working in the grocery store." I personally would much rather be slightly embarrassed by my debit card not working than to get charged hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees.

I wrote my first greasemonkey script yesterday. Protects me from being meatspinned, lemonpartied, or any of about 40 other shock sites. It was only two lines of javascript, but I think the idea was the cool part.

Forwards you to a picture of a kitten and pops up an alert that says , “No thanks”.

You can change the redirect page and message if you don’t mind editing the source, it’s pretty simple.

Redirects from shock sites to www.google.com

** Greasemonkey only runs in firefox

You can download the script after you install greasemonkey for firefox here:

FratHouseInsurance.

You can also view the source at the above link.

Thanks Matt Carda, for the sweet idea.