Yesterday was a strange day…
In the morning, even with a slightly late start, I got to work on time. Apparently the traffic jam was working in my favor. The day itself went on normally until around 1 p.m., when Tsvetan sent me a link to some DreamHost promotion for their 11th birthday.
I opened it and started reading.. with every row of the hosting specs table, my eyes got bigger and greedier (I was even drooling a bit :D ).
It quickly became clear that this was the thing and I was going to buy it, BUT a problem popped up - how to pay. I have a card with online payments enabled, but no money on it, while Tsvetan has money but no online payments - we hit a rock… or rather straight-up granite.
Next step - he sends me money through ePay.bg and I pay. Everything fine, right up to the moment it turns out that I have the status of some kind of dummy there and my daily limit for receiving is… 50 leva. I quickly start looking for how to become a ‘known’ user and I’m shocked by what I find:
How to move up to a higher level
To move up to level “2” - “known customer”, you need to have a bank card registered in your user profile, with which you must pay at least 5 utility bills for electricity, water, phone, heating, etc. through the system (paying for a prepaid service does not count as paying a utility bill).
Come on, seriously! At least 5 utility bills… what is this nonsense. Like I own a house I’d be paying those bills for. Utter nonsense. If they had asked for a photo of an ID card or something like that, fine… but this is too much, especially if you need to transfer a certain amount of money right now, this very moment.
I can already feel the promotion slipping out of our little hands like a soapy glass. In this situation we fall back on the most extreme option - he’ll deposit money in Varna directly into my account at Postbank and we hope it works out. I give him my IBAN, and he heads off to deposit it. He calls me after 25-30-40 minutes: “I made the transfer, they said the changes will show up in online banking within 2 hours.” Naturally, hearing “2 hours” I was shocked at how this whole thing was going down to the wire, and I waited 15 loooong minutes, logged into e-postbank and, with EYES THIS BIG and my jaw on the floor, saw that the money had arrived.
Feverishly I open the link Tsvetan had sent me a bit earlier to the cart in Google Checkout, fill in my details, click Check out and done… At that moment millions of question marks were bursting in my head - how come there are no account verifications here, like with Moneybookers or PayPal, no demands for withdrawing small amounts or any such nonsense, you just fill in your info, click pay and that’s it…
After that I fired off a text to him saying I had paid, grabbed my luggage and headed to the Central Station to go home to Montana. There I met up with a few ‘fellow travelers’, we bought tickets and got on the train. We set off, but I couldn’t wait another 3 hours to find out whether the payment had really gone through, so I called Tsvetan, who confirmed everything was fine. That took a weight off my heart and I breathed out.
Four things follow from this day:
- ePay are miserable cheapskates, along with PayPal and Moneybookers.
- Postbank keeps reinforcing my opinion that they are the right choice.
- Google, as usual, rock my world with their simple procedures.
- I’m loving Dreamhost! (only the uploading there sucks really badly, but more on that later)
P.S. Damn it, I now owe Tsvetan 90 bucks :-D