Cyborg Names Part 2: The Devil and Daniel Paypal
The names that were generated for us yesterday were very funny, so I thought I'd order shirts for Gloria, Eli 4.0, and myself. I mean, how often do you get a chance to give your wife a t-shirt with a robot on it and her name represented this way: General Lifeform Optimized for Repair and Immediate Assassination.That's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, my friends.
So this is the part where I say that PayPal is the devil. Not expecting that, I bet.
The form to pay for the products says that PayPal is the preferred vendor (and it's clearly a PayPal payment page). However, it also says
Don't Have a PayPal Account?
You don't need an account. Pay securely using your credit card.
Like I said, PayPayl is the devil, so I was skeptical. However, I went ahead and filled out field after field with information, credit card number, etc. Hit "submit" and it told me my payment session had "expired" and that I needed to re-enter the information.
Outstanding. So I do. Guess what? My payment session has "expired." Repeat, repeat, give up. E-mail the Cyborg Name guys--they're very apologetic and say it's a PayPal problem that will hopefully be fixed shortly.
Tried it again this morning--payment session "expired."
This is actually not the reason that I call PayPal the devil. It's just an item on the list. I loved PayPay at first--great, great idea.
At first. Then, over the course of a few years, I wound up spending over a thousand dollars with my PayPal account (it involves buying twenty copies of System Shock 2 from Hong Kong, but I'll tell you about that on another day). Suddenly, I get this message from PayPal that says I've gone past the "thousand dollar limit" and I have to give them my bank account number.
What the?
Apparently, once you pass that thousand dollar threshold, they try to "convert" your account, which involves getting your bank account number. If I remember correctly, a certain amount of money is withdrawn at intervals and placed in a PayPal account for you to use when you make purchases. And oh, by the way, I assume that unused money is drawing interest for PayPal while it sits there in your (actually their) account.
That caused a five-alarm fire at the Bullshit Management Command Center. So I told them "no."
And that was the end of my PayPal account. Once you break a thousand dollars, it's unusable until you give them a bank account number. And if you try to open another account with the same e-mail address, forget it. Or if you try using a different e-mail address and the same credit card, forget it.
It's incredible, really. And horrible business practice. They already have a secure payment method that guarantees them revenue and instead they go anal probe on you.
That happened a couple of years ago, and hopefully they've changed their policy by now, but somehow I doubt it. And I wanted nothing to do with them after that.
Now, though, they're back. Somehow I bet if I had a PayPal account, that transaction would have gone through with no problem. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the reason the transaction failed is that because I used the same e-mail address, they know I'm one of the rebel holdouts.
I'm bunkering down here, boys, send food and water. I hear helicopters hovering over the house. I'm sure the PayPal goons are on their way.
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