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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Typically when you are moving debt to a credit card, you are not making a purchase, but are withdrawing cash from the credit account to pay for the LOC. A cash advance usually means you are paying interest on the amount withdrawn immediately at super high credit card rates. There is usually no grace period given for cash advances. IIRC, the cash balance is tracked separately from your regular card balance, and payments first go to paying off the normal monthly balance, and when that hits zero, they go towards the cash advance balance. That keeps you paying high interest for longer if you can’t pay it off in full. You’d have to read your terms of service to confirm how your card handles this. Be careful to make sure you understand your terms.

    There are frequently special balance transfer offerings issued by card companies that allow you to transfer your credit balance from one card to another for a fixed initial cost (3% of balance seems normal now), and then you get up to 12 months at 0% interest. That can be a pretty good deal, but you would have to confirm if you could do a cash advance on one card, then balance transfer to a second one using a promotional offer and make sure the second card doesn’t still treat it as a cash advance balance, which would likely be subject to immediate high interest rates. This is probably the most likely scenario. However, if you can confirm they treat the transferred balance as normal, it would end up being cheaper than a year at LOC interest. Then you pay it off in full with the LOC and repeat, assuming you get another offer. I think it is more likely banks will look out for each other and that won’t work for cash advance credit card debt, but hey, maybe there are banks that just want your business and only a little cash instead of a lot.






  • Didn’t join the site to download the pdf, but it looks like it is trying to find a correlation between wanting to leave the public service and answering a survey question about how often you can use your preferred language. As such, I am not sure if they have any follow up queations on why people answered what they did in the survey, but it could be as simple as they have to interact with unilingual people. Even if they have a bilingual boss (who, even at CCC may not be very good), they may not have bilingual clients or team mates and therefore have to work in one language most of the time.

    IT in particular can be tricky, since most things are only English. A lot of software tools only come in English, and a big chunk of vendor support is from the US and often does not have a French option. The contractor pool is also largely English since the Canadian private sector doesn’t require bilingualism for tech workers.







  • Happened at a DC I worked at, but a little before my time. Someone thought it would be a bright idea to use the design of some 1970s Californian architectural prodigy in Canada. When winter hit, the humid air condensed on the inside of the uninsulated metal roof and it rained in the attic, eventually leaking out across the entire computer room ceiling. They had pictures that showed 6mm poly stretched out and taped above all the mainframes and DASD while water rained down from above, running off the sides of the plastic sheeting and pooling on the raised floor. They also used to throw wild alcohol-fueled Christmas parties, and climbed up on top of the racks so they could play games jumping from row to row. What a time to be employed!