Can I set up a decent-quality subsistence lifestyle and live, more or less, as a peasant (note: peasants own their land. In that sense, they are not poor)? This is the type of question that arises from almost every attempt to engage in commerce in the real world, with points of failure often coming down to payment failures and disastrously bad bank IT quagmires.
The initial idea was to purchase 4 new Eizo EV3285 white monitors. This is my standard monitor, so it seemed like a reasonable idea to buy some more. Although, on second thoughts, perhaps all they would do is enable yet more futile admin of the kind described here, let's accept for the sake of this article that our objective is to purchase them.
I haven't found a Guernsey supplier of the EV3285, or a UK supplier who will ship to Guernsey, so my approach will be to buy and take delivery of them to friends / family in the UK, and then collect them when I am visiting. As well as adding them to my list of products to sell in my "things Tom likes" Guernsey shop, which may never come into existence.
I found a retailer I've used several times before, Wex Photo Video. They showed it as being in stock, although they didn't show how many.
I decided to place the order by phone, partly so I could find out how many pieces they have in stock. The person on the phone didn't like that the card address was outside the UK, and said please use web site, choose paypal (yuck) payment option, it will work.
Despite feeling slightly sick, I gave this a go. I logged into my existing wex account, but at checkout wex's web site gave me a 500 Internal Server Error. Pro tip: if your web site gives a 500 Internal Server Error, it is always the fault of the web server, not the web browser. Always.
Their web site had failed, so I called them again, to try again to place the order by phone. But after my description of their web site's 500 internal server error, their rep started asking me questions about what browser I was running. What's with this standard corporate passive-aggressive bullshit, of trying to make the customer feel like it's their fault, by enquiring all about their browser platform, when it's the business's web site that has blown up? You gave a 500 internal server error; the make and model of my browser is totally fucking irrelevant, imbeciles. This having been politely stated, we tried again to place the order by phone.
The employee said a note was on my account that I was unhappy and unwilling to proceed because VAT would be charged. This was the opposite of the truth: I had said I had no problem paying the VAT, didn't care, was happy to eat it.
But we reached a similar dead-end where the invoice address, which they had to keep the same because it's the address on my wex account, was outside the uk, and they didn't want to do it.
I said I'm happy to pay by bank transfer if that's easier. They then sent me an email.. without the payment details. I got in touch again to ask for the actual payment details, and this time they managed to send them.
All that remained was to send payment to the specified account details. Easy, right? Since my banking on Guernsey is still not quite set up to the point of being able to make payments (after 6 months btw), I selected my undead Barclays account.
I logged in, entered the payment details, did the "respond" with pinsentry thing (this should be enough), ticked lots of "anti-fraud" boxes that skidded around the screen, and, but ... Barclays have added yet more obstacles to making a basic payment. And this time we are switching a workflow from the web to SMS, along with the bigly-increased probabilty of failure of the overall process that that entails. The web page didn't say that, it just said "We're holding your payment and running some extra security checks":
but some seconds later an SMS arrived on my phone, which luckily I have been trained into having on me, otherwise everything works even less and fails even more, and the first SMS says:
We'd like you to confirm a payment made via Online Banking. You'll receive another text from us that will ask you to reply Y or N. If you've been called and asked to to transfer money to a "safe" or "secure" account, stop, this is a scam. #BeFraudsmart. Your Barclays Team.
Is the answer to the problem of widespread fraud, largely caused by banks' incompetence and their customers' stupidity, to treat every payment like fraud? Anyhow, I stood by for the next SMS, willing to reply for the sake of getting this damned payment through. Sure enough, the next one arrived:
Did you make the following Barclays Online Payment 19/05/2023 4568.00 WEX PHOTO AND VIDEWEX PHOTO AND VIDEO? Please reply Y if the payment is yours or N if it is fraud. Please respond within 60 minutes.
I don't recall agreeing that my payments will be made to depend on SMS interaction. This is a radically-different service from what I signed up for in 1998, when, remember, online banking worked. I despise the way every service ties me in to realtime SMS reception. But I go along, for the sake of getting this thing done, and I see an error message on the phone, which is only displayed for a couple of seconds (disappearing error messages: bad, but we're at the bottom of such a pile here, it's not necessarily relevant), saying something along the lines of "Can't send error with Sure - 0" ("Sure" is the name of the mobile network, not a sarcastic comment by the phone).
The message status on the phone is shown as "Not sent, tap to try again". So by adding a requirement for realtime SMS chat, Barclays have made it impossible to do the payment. And, bizarrely, there is not way to write to Barclays via online banking. They used to have a function for that, but they removed it. The only way to write to them is by paper in the post!
How might I complete this attempted purchase? Perhaps by waiting for getting payment capability via new Guernsey banking, and doing it from one of them. Perhaps by flying to the UK, withdrawing the cash, and hand-delivering it to Wex, and getting a paper receipt? Or perhaps Wex accept cheques? (What is wrong with cheques, by the way).
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