Paypal Debacle

I use a paypal card reader that’s comparable to the more commonly known “square” to run credit card transactions at shows.  It’s pretty quirky and if I am not super careful swiping the card, the transaction doesn’t go through. The weather is also a factor in its ability to effectively transmit a signal from a rectangular piece of plastic to outer space from this little piece of silicone and metal then to a bank account , back to outer space, to PayPal’s headquarters in Cali then back to my phone anywhere in the world I may be in like 5 freaking seconds.  It’s pretty miraculous we have this technology to begin with, and completely believable that something would interrupt this interplanetary signal bounce, but boy do I get ticked off when it does. 

Last weekend starting Saturday morning I was having trouble with my card reader and in a different way than normal. Typically I swipe it and it says swipe declined on my phone then I redo it and it works, however this day, when I swiped, nothing happened it all, it was like my phone was completely unaware I was even trying to take money from a credit card in exchange for a painting! So I called PayPal and as it turns out, they were having lots of problems with card readers that morning and the solution that seemed to be working for all of the other disappointed PayPal Here users in the world was to delete the app, turn off phone and redownload it once the phone is back on.  Paypal and Iphones have something in common then.  So I did it and no dice, same problem 10 minutes later.  To clarify, I wasn’t losing sales because of my phones inability to do what I consider to be magic to begin with, but I was having to type in the cards manually, giving paypal a cool 3.5% of my sales as opposed to the swipe’s 2.7%.  So now my skeptical brain is starting to theorize that PayPal is involved in some conspiracy to increase profits by occasionally declining card swipes.  This continues for a few thousand dollars on Saturday and now paypal in my opinion owes me $18. 

The show concludes on Saturday and there is an artist award dinner to which I tell the girls at my table my PayPal woes and a girl gives me a square to try out.  So Sunday morning I am on hold trying to get through to paypal when someone comes and interrupts me by wanting to buy a big aluminum print.  (yay!) I try to run his card through paypal swiper with no avail, so I tried the square and nothing either. At this point I realize that it probably isn’t the paypal card swiper’s problem at all and it must be the cord that I have to screw into the headphones jack on my phone since I have a life proof case and I can’t plug the reader directly into the phone.

So I’ve been blaming PayPal this whole time and really its been my lifeproof cord, but I still needed to call Paypal because when you exceed a certain amount of transactions that are manually entered and not swiped in a week they freeze the money and I needed them to unfreeze it.   (which is so silly that they freeze it because you can just call and ask them to release it and they’ll do it immediately) Once the guy on the phone has unfrozen my withheld money, I tell him that I need him to credit my account $18 because of the discrepancy in fees which were PayPal’s fault (although you and I both know they were actually life proof’s fault but I want my $18 Damnit!)  and he says he cant do it, that he’ll need to talk to a supervisor… “Put him on John!!” I get put on hold and he comes back a few minutes later and says that he actually credited my account for $20 because the fee on manually entered transactions is actually 3.5% + $.15. 
Soooo…. Now I need a new lifeproof headphones cord.  

The end