A Bad Day continued...

I thought the day had been fairly bad so far, having spent most of it sorting out the PayPal transaction I had not made and getting the bank to do some giving rather than their usual taking! I can't say it got worse, but it didn't get better.

Little Z had had a dressing up day at school. They were having a garden party and had been asked to dress up as "anything to do with the garden". Little Z had gone as a garden gnome. She was very happy as we collected her from school and was excited as her best friend, Little M, was coming to play at our house and stay for tea. They had fun playing dressing-up and painting mugs and after dinner the girls and Big J went out into the garden to play on the swing, slide and trampoline. As we have bark down instead of grass in the garden, it didn't matter that the weather had been wet, because they weren't going to get muddy.

What I didn't know is that we'd had a recent visit (probably several) to our garden by a fox or a cat (probably both) leaving deposits of something which could not be seen because it was all the same colour as the bark. So, in addition to having it stuck to the bottom of my shoes and the children's shoes, the children had managed to get it on their clothes (including little Z's white dressing gown!) as they slid down the slide onto the bark and had also brought it all through the ground floor of the house, across the road play rug (sorry Seany, again!) into the hallway, up the stairs, across the landing and into the bathroom! Lovely. The smell was disgusting and it took all evening to clean it up. The most difficult thing was not so much the cleaning as stopping the children walking through it and spreading it further! Again, I suppose I can consider myself lucky that we don't have carpets in any of those places. Lucky me!

A Bad Day...

The last Friday 13th I wrote a post on a crazy superstition I had read about on the internet. Although I still have no time for such silly superstitions, after my Friday 13th experience yesterday, I am beginning to wonder whether there is something unlucky about that day.

After taking Little Z to school (dressed as a gnome - that's another story!) and Big J to nursery, I dropped off a birthday present at a friend's house and came straight home. The first thing I usually do when I get home (when I am not working) is check my emails. My email box is often full of junk sent by people who think am I interested in increasing the size of my manhood(?) or that I am desperate for a cheap supply of viagra(??).

However, the email which caught my attention was the one from PayPal telling me that my payment of $220 had been made for some photography equipment. Nothing unusual about that, I suppose, apart from the fact that I have not bought any photographic equipment and had not authorised a payment through PayPal.

I then noticed another email from PayPal telling me that the seller had issued me with a full refund. That's okay then. I guess I could consider myself lucky that I was getting the money back. Couldn't I?

The problem though, is that debits go out almost immediately, whereas refunds take several days, so the money is going to debit my account on Monday and the refund is unlikely to reach my account until Wednesday, which would not be a problem if the account had fund in or an overdraft facility, but, as it is not my main account, it has neither. So, I called the bank and spoke to seven different people who between the told me that because this was not my main account and it has no turnover they were not prepared to arrange a temporary overdraft facility for £40 (which was all I needed) for 2 weeks. They also told me they could not stop the payment going out as it had been authorised already, they told me they would not waive the unauthorised excess fee and that PayPal needed to contact them to stop the payment going through.

I had already phoned PayPal who had been very helpful and given me immediate instruction on how to flag the unauthorised transaction to them and how to change my passwords and what precautionary measures to take etc.. They had said that the banks would usually waive any fee once they knew it was unauthorised. They had asked me to contact the bank to let them know PayPal were investigating it and said they would get back to me within a few days.

So, after being passed around at the bank and explaining my situation to seven different people and explaining that PayPal were not going to stop the transaction as they needed to investigate it first and by the time they had done that the money would have come out already and in addition to this, the money was already on its way back because the person who had received the money had realised it was not his and had refunded it (breathe!), I got through to someone who actually listened to what I was saying and agreed that under the circumstances I would not have to pay an unauthorised overdraft fee unless I made another withdrawal which took me overdrawn. Finally!

I completed all the necessary online forms for PayPal and changed my passwords etc. so having spent all morning sorting this out, I then spent most of the afternoon downloading anti-spyware software and running deep scans on my computer. There was nothing there, but I am now quite confident that I have even better protection against anyone trying to obtain my personal details.

Oh Well. All's well that ends well! Or is it???.....