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Saturday 25 August 2012

Typewriter Books Winging Their Way – And Why PayPal Sucks


I have had some messages asking about the typewriter booklets which have been bought through this blog. I can assure buyers the booklets, all of them personally signed, are on their way, to places from Australia’s Top End to Singapore to Estonia and the US of A in between.
A big thank you to those who bought them:
Ching Caroline
Mark Petersen
Bill MacLane
Ken Coghlan
Frank Notten
Michael Höhne
Raivo Oravas
Kane Horni (Nat)
Antonio Sison (Ton)
After some confusion at my end over an extra payment, Tori has set me straight and another copy will be on its way to Ted Munk on Monday.
I apologise profusely for a short delay. It has been a week from hell. Freezing weather, illness - both physical and mental - and certain life-changing matters (dealing with my impending redundancy at my workplace) have all got in the way.
Such things have conspired to divert me from more important matters: typewriters. But typewriter-wise, it has been a memorable week. More on that later.
Has anyone else noticed that when Murphy’s Law applies, and everything that can go wrong does go wrong, one pines to take solace and seek solitude in one’s typewriters? I was acutely aware of it all week.
Don’t Pay
Isn’t a Pal
One of the problems I have had concerns PayPal. Perhaps naively I decided to set a new PayPal account just for booklet payments, thinking it was safer when putting an email address on my blog. Of course, the gmail inbox still soon got cluttered with spam.
PayPal wouldn’t let me link my bank account or Visa account to the new typewriter booklets account, saying these were already being used with my original PayPal account. Fair enough, I suppose; I assumed the new PayPal account would only be used for incoming payments.
However, when the booklet payments started to flood in, and I tried to send money to my original PayPal account, PayPal blocked me. So then I sent a request for money from the original account to the booklet account, and that has been marked as “pending” for more than a week now.
So the situation is, I have money in the booklet account which I cannot access, except to pay for eBay items. I keep telling PayPal that this is MY money, not theirs, but PayPal refuses to let me have it. PayPal also refuses to communicate with me to tell me why.
Anyone have any suggestions as to how I can get at my money?
PS: I can’t seem to get rid of this damned mysmart.incredibar from my Google Chrome, so that’s not working properly for me either. Oh, dear ... back to the typewriters!
PPS: The FuNkOMaTiC has 25 watchers but only one bid so far. There are still almost six days to go.

6 comments:

Mark said...

I wonder how many FuNkOmATic viewers are people following it for fun because they saw it here and how many are people who want it.

I know very little about dealing with paypal other than that it is inflexible. See if you can get a live operator on the phone next time you have a half hour.

Thanks for sending the booklets! I am very excited. I understand the delay. Just more time to be excited about it!

L Casey said...

I have had more than my fair share of problems while dealing with Paypal, and persistence is key.
I am very excited for the booklet to come in, and thanks a whole lot for signing it. Whenever it gets here, it gets here. I wasn't really in a rush considering my assumption of how long it is going to take to get here from Australia anyway.

I am not sure how long it is right now since you posted this, but I am happy to report that the Funkomatic is up to six bids now, for a total of $27.04. Plenty of time to go on it yet!

Bill M said...

Considering PP and Epay (Ebay) are all in the same it is no wonder both are a PIA. I have had my share of much of the same with PP. There are alternates to PP, but Epay won't let users use them. I wonder how they work for personal use?

Maybe old fashioned Western Union would avoid the problems; only they have no traceability or confirmations of sent/received as far as I remember.

Ted said...

The only way I know to have PayPal pay attention to you is to suddenly go from processing a few hundred dollars a month to processing tens of thousands of dollars a month. That happened to a buddy of mine and Paypal ended up assigning him a personal account representative *just for him*. He got pretty good service after that. :D

PS. Thanks for straightening our payment out and signing our copy! (:

Anonymous said...

So sorry to hear of your travails. If we know anyone who does not deserve hassles, it is you. We hope it works out OK.

And thanks for the books.

== Michael

Previous PP Employee said...

PayPal is seeing that you are sending payments from one account to the other from the same computer. It thinks someone is hacking your account to take you money. If you contact PayPal directly by phone, they can help you work around that and maybe even move the funds from one account to the other for you over the phone. Their number is 888-221-1161.