Luke Sheldrick's Blog

So I am greeted today with even more PayPal fail (they’ll now be known to me as payfail).

A few months back, I had a letter from Natwest, who informed me they were charging me £25 a day for being over my overdraft limit. Interesting, I don’t have an overdraft, nor have I used that account since I worked for them quite some years ago.

Checking my online banking with them, and noticed ~£450 worth of PayPal direct debits. Interesting, these transactions were not listed on my PayPal account. Sent them a few emails explaining this, and they then said I had to call to discuss further. When I called they had no knowledge of the email correspondence, so I had to go through it all again. They basically said that they could not help as the transactions were not listed on my account, and they could only talk to me about MY account. They advised I talk to my bank.

Called up the bank, and explained the situation, then got put through to fraud, explained, then put through to another department, who said as I had given my bank details to PayPal years back (to deposit, not debit), it wasn’t fraud, and it was something I’d need to take up with PayFail. Back to step 1.

I then explained they can’t help, and it’s up to the bank to resolve. The only thing they could do was advise me to go into a branch, and fill out a direct debit indemnity form, as these were direct debits, and they could return them that way.

Off to the branch I went, to then be told, that form is for modifying a direct debit, I.e. you’re paying £50 a month to sky, but should only be paying £45. It wasn’t for historic transactions. They suggest I talk to PayFail. Awesome! nobody wants to take ownership.

I then asked to talk to a manager, who apparently was busy for the afternoon. I advised I probably wouldn’t be leaving the branch until I spoke to he/she, so I’ll happily wait. I had the paper, my iPad and my Macbook, so I had plenty to keep me busy. Within 10 minutes, that very busy manager was then available.

She was very helpful, and talk to the fraud team, who had earlier said they couldn’t help. They agreed to take on my case, and would give me a call by 16:00 (it was 14:00 at the time) to confirm the refunds were in place.

At around 17:00 I thought, hey, where is my call? I gave the fraud team a call, and the person I spoke to had advised the chap who was dealing with my account had gone home. I then proceeded to ask for a manager, as I had been given the royal run around. Spoke to a very nice lady who was the supervisor who advised the handling team had rejected the case, as I had at some point given my details to PayFail.

As you can imagine, not the best of responses to give to an already peeved customer. She was pretty good, and said that department was now closed, but she was in at 09:00 the next morning, and would personally go talk to the manager of that department. She advised I check my account in the morning, and if there weren’t refunds on the account by 10:00 to give her a call directly.

The refunds were on there. Awesome. Later that afternoon, I started to get emails from people on eBay I had previously purchased things from. PayFail in their infinite wisdom, had not just looked at the amounts I had contested, they had rejected all payments I had made, all the genuine transactions. I can only imagine they couldn’t find the actual transactions that had been posted to my current account, so made up the funds from the genuine transactions. So lots of irate (and rightly so) people from eBay. I explained the situation, and most of them were fine. They just had to give PayFail some docs to prove they were g transactions, and a copy of my email.

I thought that was all done and dusted. Until someone sent me some money today, I had totally forgot they had an annual auto payment to my account. The money has been accepted, and now cannot be returned. So I have funds in my PayFail account, and oh, I can’t get hold of them.

See above, my account has been ‘limited’, funny, as it was them that had made all the errors, but they feel the need to limit my account. Interesting.

The only way I can get my account working again, is to confirm my details. One of the things I need to do, is confirm 2 transactions to my bank account. They put two transactions through up to £1, and I need to tell them how much they were for. Except, my bank have blocked all transactions from PayFail, and I do not particularly want to give them the details of my actual current account, just in case they go on a frenzy again.

Arse!

This is an admittance of failure, by one party, me. Today was working on a load of issues at work, and lost access to my home IM server. This usually means network manager on my laptop has dropped the VPN, and just need to redial.

However today, slightly different, in that my VPN GW had fallen over. Luckily this is a virtual machine on one of my servers in London, so just have to reset the guest via VMWare. Unfortunately, this is on one my older servers, still running VMWare Server 1.x, and also for added fun, I can only access the Host via the VPN, seeing the problem here?

Well I do have a ‘backdoor’. Anyways I digress, whilst I was resetting the guest, I thought I’d take a look at what snapshots I had for it.

After clicking the second button, I quickly remembered, VMWare Server 1.x, only has one snapshot. Oh dear, within  a blink it was restoring to the previous snapshot, with no way to stop it.

Checking further, this snap shot was old, very old, about 3 months old. So it booted back up. Here comes the second fail. The server in question, happens to be the master, of my MySQL servers, so decided to quickly replicate it’s self, wiping all the new data from the other nodes. Is also my primary NS, so replicated those too. It also does a shit load of other things, that I wont go into, but that broke lots too.

Alas, shouldn’t be a problem though, as I have a four hourly rsync of the configs taken, and replicated off site. Here comes the third and forth fail. 3) the MySQL dumps, appear to have stopped working, looks like there was a regression in one of the scripts. 4) I’d been working on the offsite nas a few months back, and didn’t want the rotation of backups to occur whilst I was doing the work. You guessed it, I forgot to switch it back on. Fuck!

These are all my own fault, I have no way to deny. I spend most of my working day fixing other people’s silly mistakes like this, and setting up systems / procedures so this doesn’t EVER happen, you’d think I’d actually tick a few things off my personal to do list, huh?

Nevermind, managed to fix it all in the end, well mostly… fail fail fail fail fail

I am starting to think, a big box of money under my bed may be a better idea than using Bank’s. Now I used to work at a Bank for a number of years, and saw my fair share of fu-bars, but some other Bank’s just take the piss.

I’ve always been a fan of not keeping all your eggs in one basket, so I have my emergency account & savings with a different bank to my usual current account. The emergency account happens to be IF or Intelligent Finance. Opening the account was a nightmare, but that was largely due to muppets at Halifax. All that set aside they’re not too terrible.

Apart from their online service, which is the only way you can manage your account. I must say I only ever check ever couple of months, and I need to at the moment, so I log on, and because I rarely use it, I have all the details recorded. What a supprise:

It seems everytime I log on, I’ve been locked out. No doubt due to one of those nice chinese hacker folk. So I duely phone up the number provided, and get an IVR, pop in my details, then get connected to an operator, who I have to go through all this again… the joy. The chump then informs me that, the only way I can unlock my account is to be sent an unlock code, which is sent by second class post. Being Friday, it’ll be quite a few days then.

I asked why it had been locked out, and due to excessive log on attempts, which backs up what their site says. No I know it’s not me who has tried to log in, baring this once, so there isn’t really much I can do here.

So there we have it, everytime I want to check my IF account, I’ll have a weekish delay.