$%^&* Software

Paypal cut me off this morning.  It shouldn’t have come as any surprise but it was seriously annoying nevertheless.  You pretty well can’t use anything except Paypal to pay for ebay purchases so losing access to a Paypal account when you have ebay merchandise to pay for is a huge problem.  That’s how I found out that they had cut me off.  I went to pay some poor slob in Florida for $18 worth of electrical bits that I had bought from him and there it was “your account is temporarily suspended”.

Normally I can go months or maybe even a whole year without ever using my Paypal account so the fact that I have run over $5000 through it in the last two weeks absolutely should have raised the flags.  It’s the way they do it though that pisses me off.  No warning, no phone call, no inquiring email.  Nothing at all until I logged on and couldn’t use my account.

Then of course I had to start the dance through all their stupid webforms to try to get the account reinstated.  One of the options for reinstatement was for them to mail something to me.  Now there’s a phenomenally great idea in an electronic age.  Nowhere – absolutely nowhere – was there an option to phone some live human being and get it sorted out.  Nor was there any option to send an explanatory email.  And surprisingly enough their stupid webforms didn’t have a radio box to check that said “we have spent a shitload of money provisioning a new boat over the last two weeks which is why this account is displaying unusual behaviour.”  One of the automated emails that their droids sent out when I filled out one of the stupid forms said that it could take 3 to 5 business days to get it sorted out.  I kind of lost it at that point.

By then the automated system had sent me a case number and I had been around all the various forms enough times to pretty well know my way.  So I bombarded them with faxes and filled in all the comments (limited to 65 characters) with explanations about why it didn’t need to take 5 days and how I was a good customer and this wasn’t my fault.  I don’t know if any of that helped or not but some human being phoned me after supper to say they had it sorted out.  No apology mind you.  Just “your account is reactivated ….. bye.”  Thank you very much ASSHOLE.

You should be able to tell from the header but I will stress it again.  Absolutely DO NOT click on this one if you are in any way likely to be offended by repeated and persistent profanity.  On the other hand if fuck is a part of your daily vocabulary then you just might find this one ****ing hilarious.