PayPal and Humility.

.....I've had PayPal as part of my web-site, www.ingasbo.com, for at least five years now. It has been a fantastic relationship. It allows for credit cards to be accepted, without paying huge bank fees. It allows for easy purchase of my circlets. It gives a great set of records of business transactions. I really have liked using it.

.....For the past couple of months though a couple of problems have come up, the most notable of which has been a lack of notifications of payment or inquiry. A number of orders have been placed about which I hear nothing until I actually go to the PayPal web-site to see them. Rather frustrating in the fact that I've relied on that notification as a reminder and work order.

.....So I go to the contact section of the PayPal web-site and go through the process of asking them why I'm having this problem. In reply I get this reply from them that is so generic in nature that my first take on it is that it is the most patronizing set of actions that I've seen in a long time. I am sitting there grumbling under my breath, composing in my mind this blast of verbiage basically telling them to pull their heads out of their posterior caverns and listen to me.

.....Then I stop a second and think about what I wrote to them in the first place. I said nothing to them about already checking my spam folder, or that I have not changed my e-mail address and that I already went through all of what I considered to be the obvious first steps in trying to figure out what is happening. I just tell them that I'm having this problem.

.....Now, I'm sure that this IT person deals with hundreds of irate and downright foolish people on a daily basis. The fact that this person did their best to be polite to me was a good thing. And I'm sure that many, many others wouldn't hesitate before unloading their frustrations out on this IT person.

.....I'm composing a NEW letter, outlining everything I've already done to solve the problem on my own in the hopes that they'll actually do a little investigation for me to see if there are any problems happening from their end. We'll see what happens.

.....So, it's time to practice being nice. I don't know if Master Ralg is tranferring curmudgeonness to me via osmosis, but this getting old thing is turning me into a grouch. And I seem to be able to go from nice to grouch in 1.8 seconds flat. I think that I need to start hanging out with nice people a little more often. :-)

.....Aaron / Arontius.