Sun Shares costing me money again!

Well, if I didn't need it before, I'm just after getting more validation of my rule never to accept stock options from a company ever again. I thought the time that Mercer sent me the check for 2 cents after selling some shares for me was bad enough, or the time that they offered to sell $27 worth of shares for me and charging me $30 handling fee for the privilege, but this one takes the fucking cake!

I'm just after getting a letter from Dolmen stockbrokers, who AFAIK for their sins took over from Mercer on the Sun account:

"Please be advised that the annual account fee for the period July 2008 to June 2009 is due for application now, and we are also taking this opportunity to ascertain whether prior year account harges hev been fully discharged"

Ok, so far so good. Here's what I owe:

Portfolio balance as at 9th July: €10.93
Account fee due to July 2009 Inc Vat: €54.45

What the Fuck? I owe them €55 for looking after €10 of stock for me? Screw that! But it gets better.

Account fee due to July 2007 Inc Vat: €48.40
Account fee due to July 2008 Inc Vat: €48.40

Seems I must have not bothered opening a few other letters once I saw they were from Dolmen. So, seems I owe them just over €140!

The letter goes on:

"If Dolmen does not receive your remittance by latest, 18th August 2008, we will ahve no choice but to apply Section 13 of our Terms and Conditions which permit Dolmen Stockbrokers to dispose of any investment held for you to reduce ie eliminate the relevant liability. the proceeds of sale (net of sell out cost of €30) will be applied to your acount."

Oh no, you meam I'm not going to be able to pass on this $10 of stock to my grandchildren? I say "grandchildren" because it'll probably take that long before the stock is worth slightly more than fuck-all again.

Now comes the threat:

"In the event that you have insufficient stock to discharge the liability, Dolmen will dispose of the investment to reduce the liablility and close the account"

FINALLY they say something I agree with! Yes, by all means, close the account, enjoy the €10 of Sun stock for the short time before it goes down to €8. This will also help them do their bit for the environment by not having to waste paper sending me out these stupid fucking balance letters any more! I just wish Solomon Smith Barney would do the same......

Working late

Well, here we go, am 5 weeks into the company and this is my 2nd day going home from the office at 6am - and the second day in a row actually! This better not be the start of a trend! This is one of the problems of working with a large telco as a customer (or any large customer-facing organization), the only time they can take their big-ass databases off-line for maintenance is overnight. So, I did a full day's work on tues, came back into work at 11:30pm, left around 6:45am weds, was back in again around 11, did another day's work, came back in last night at 11:30pm again, and I should be leaving here in the next few mins provided nothing goes tits-up.

So, by 9am tomorrow morning, out of the last 48hrs I will have spent 29 of them in the office, and only 6 of the others asleep (well, that would be if I was actually getting into work at 9am, which ain't fucking happening!)

The worst part of it is I wasn't actually busy most of the time. I had a busy first hour shutting down al the services and setting everything up, a busy last 30mins starting everything back up again, and most of the rest of the time was just monitoring stuff every now and then to make sure nothing had keeled over! I could have done it from home but I don't have a VPN account yet so had to come into the office :-( At least I was able to being in my home laptop with my game/movie collection!