Getting annoyed by banks

Yesterday evening I was trying to see how I could reclaim tax from interest paid on my bank accounts in the last 3 years while I've not been earning anything. The form requires quite a bit of info like how much interest you earned and how much it was taxed.

Surely the Inland Revenue must have this info already, otherwise I could put whatever I wanted and they wouldn't be able to check it!

Anyway, I thought I best just get on with the job and find out how much interest I'd been paid and how much tax I'd paid by going through my bank statements. Unfortunately, the Alliance & Leicester bank statements only go back about 250 days. Looking at the info on Alliance & Leicester's website, it says that you should download statements to ensure you have historical statements.

Why didn't they tell me this when I opened the account? It was probably in the small print, but something like this is quite important. Knowing Alliance & Leicester they probably knew it was important and so hid it in the small print knowing that no-one would read it, and so ensuring they would annoy people.

Also, there appears not be any way to request old statement data from Alliance & Leicester.

This morning I thought I might as well get on with filling in the form to prevent them from taking any more tax from future interest payments, so I did that. Unfortunately I didn't have 32p for a 2^nd class stamp and no-one had change for a note. Luckily I had a 10p stamp and lots of 1p stamps from a few years ago, so I just used those instead.

I started doing a sound recording for a video of my top 5 photography tips article, then went to help Peter set up his new printer.

After lunch I spent most of the afternoon playing Wii Sports Golf, Puzzle Bobble, and Mario Kart Wii with Mauser and Bo.

In the evening I went on Animal Crossing and also created a hubpage version of my top 5 photography tips article. They don't allow you to include images in a text 'module', so you have to use a separate image 'module' for each image. So since my article has quite a lot of images in it, it took quite a long time to do.

I also tried to set up the affiliate options in hub pages as well.