PayPal highjinks
I have the usual stacks o' new books & stuff but let's leave that aside for the moment. Let's talk about ... PAYPAL.
( cue sinister Muzak(c) )
Now, back when I was first going online back in '96 I heard of PayPal as being a new useful online method of handling money; I'd also heard that PayPal sometimes went nuts and would clear out any bank account they had access to, which was uncool to say the least. In any case, after a couple of years I decided to try it. Setting up was fairly easy, but the next step, involving $money$, was less so; in fact right about then I found myself wallowing in a stormy sea of bank debt that I spent the next ten years paying off, which meant no $money$ to start up my PayPal account (the actual process remains unclear to me after all this time).
At one point, PayPal apparently went nuts on me and, finding no bank account to clear out they not only locked my account but also all data connected to it, so I have no idea what excuse they have for this unmannerly behavior. In order to find out why, or dispute this action, or even send an email or get a phone number, I have to log onto my PayPal account - and logging on only gets me an error message saying my account is locked etc etc. No passaran.
Needless to say, I am somewhat displeased, especially my debt-clearance project is an accomplished thing several years in the past, I have some money in the bank, I even took the trouble recently to arrange for a secondary checking account for online stuff, and in various ways having a working PayPal account would be quite useful to have. So far as I know, my only out is to use another different email account, that being the primary means of identifying account holders, and I have no guarantee that this would work.
Curiously enough, I do have a half-forgotten email account, set up by a local computer tech group that I'm no longer active in, though I still receive emails from them from time to time. Hmmm...
( cue sinister Muzak(c) )
Now, back when I was first going online back in '96 I heard of PayPal as being a new useful online method of handling money; I'd also heard that PayPal sometimes went nuts and would clear out any bank account they had access to, which was uncool to say the least. In any case, after a couple of years I decided to try it. Setting up was fairly easy, but the next step, involving $money$, was less so; in fact right about then I found myself wallowing in a stormy sea of bank debt that I spent the next ten years paying off, which meant no $money$ to start up my PayPal account (the actual process remains unclear to me after all this time).
At one point, PayPal apparently went nuts on me and, finding no bank account to clear out they not only locked my account but also all data connected to it, so I have no idea what excuse they have for this unmannerly behavior. In order to find out why, or dispute this action, or even send an email or get a phone number, I have to log onto my PayPal account - and logging on only gets me an error message saying my account is locked etc etc. No passaran.
Needless to say, I am somewhat displeased, especially my debt-clearance project is an accomplished thing several years in the past, I have some money in the bank, I even took the trouble recently to arrange for a secondary checking account for online stuff, and in various ways having a working PayPal account would be quite useful to have. So far as I know, my only out is to use another different email account, that being the primary means of identifying account holders, and I have no guarantee that this would work.
Curiously enough, I do have a half-forgotten email account, set up by a local computer tech group that I'm no longer active in, though I still receive emails from them from time to time. Hmmm...