The person in charge of USIP should be a person not only with a relevant advanced degree, but also at least couple decades of experience in international diplomacy. A 28 year-old hasn’t been on earth long enough to even sort-of have the expertise required, even if we could charitably assume they chose a once in a generation child genius who got 2 PhDs by 16.

Wildly variable.

Not only would they hit you for $30 a pop, they would reorder the charges to maximise the number of hits. If say, your paycheck cleared a day late, pushing it to Monday or something dumb like that —when the mortgage payment that came through Monday morning would get processed first, then the bar bill from Friday night and the gas up on Saturday afternoon would get rung in all before the late deposit so they could ding you 3 times instead of 1.

My personal favorite was M&T bank (you scumbag fucking pieces of shit) right out of college, when I was barely covering my expenses, decided that a check I wrote for student loans was going to drop my account too low (I would have had about $4 left in an account with no required minimum balance) so cancelled it without even talking to me.

They hit me with a cancelled check fee from the bank and from the servicer which they then deducted before crediting me the cancelled check to hit me with two overdrafts, which with the extra overdrafts caused a third due to reordering. Total was about $150 in fees for writing a check I HAD THE MONEY FOR . And then, to add insult to injury, lost me my on time payments interest rate deduction forever which probably cost me a few thousand dollars more over the decade or so it took me to pay the loans off.

‘Please don’t go looking for other chats.’