paying by credit card

[Master Reeve]

I was working at a call-center for a major satellite television company quite a few years ago. I didn't experience the following, but this is as best I can recall as it was related to me. I'm afraid I'm not

A woman called in to ask why her satellite TV service wasn't working anymore, complaining that it'd been working just fine the day before. After some quick account research, the customer help rep informed her that her account was three months overdue.

"But I've been paying every month with my credit card!", indicated the customer.

The customer rep looked through the customer's account records and found no payment other than the original payment to start service, and informed the customer of this.

The customer kept insisting she'd been paying and was quite happy with the service and didn't want it disconnected. "I've been putting the card into the back of the machine every month the day before payment was due!"

.... in the back of what machine???

As it turned out, the customer was pulling out the security card from the back fo the machine -- an electronic security doohickey roughly the size and shape of a credit card -- and sliding her credit card into and back out of that slot before replacing the security card.

The story ends well, I suppose, with the customer rep taking a credit card payment over the phone and even being nice enough to eliminate the late payment charges and remove the account from 'breach of contract' status...

Hearing this story brought to mind that one 'redneck' comedian's skits about "Here's your sign...."

[tollbaby]

You're confusing two different comedians. Jeff Foxworthy is the "redneck" guy (you might be a readneck if....). Bill Engvall is the "idiot sign" guy. I know, all southerners sound the same... (extreme tongue-in-cheekness)

[Boozy]

Awesome story.

I need to go pay my phone bill now. I think I'll just pick up the handset, punch in my credit card number, and hang up. No fuss, no muss.

[air914]

well that's certainly creative..... wonder where on earth she got that idea from.... that she could pay that way.......

[Dreamstalker]

http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictur...rs/sct024.html

[Kiwi]

thats like the woman who fed her computer rice or the moron who uses his cd holder thingy for a drink coaster!

[DGoddessChardonnay]

She put her credit card into the slot in the satellite receiver????

Actually, even though that sounds like a special kind of stupid, it doesn't sound so far-fetched.

I mean, if you can order pay per view with your remote (old cable company had that option) then why not make the payment through the tv?

Hmmm

[JustADude]

I mean, if you can order pay per view with your remote (old cable company had that option) then why not make the payment through the tv?

Hmmm

You know, that does make sense. Not true, of course, but if one didn't KNOW that, a logic chain could indeed be formed. Of course, we who know better still get to laugh at them, but at least everyone was non-sucky and everything ended well.

[HawaiianShirts]

Our store techs like to call us up to their bench to show us some of the odd and amusing things they find. Aside from a couple of credit/debit cards, I've found the following shoved into the PCMCIA card slots on laptops:

- Compact Flash memory card
- USB Flash Drive
- Game Boy cartridge (from the original system)
- Some large foreign coin
- Military ID card
- Condom (in wrapper and unused)
- Laffy Taffy (wrapper opened but still attached)

Some weren't stuck, so I'm guessing the customer just forgot to remove them before bringing the computer in for service, but I want to know WHY those things were there to begin with.

[technical.angel]

Week before last, we got to perform laptop surgery.

These laptops have a card reader in the front. The professor said that someone put in a mini SD card in the reader.. in the dark... and put the card in sideways. It was very firmly stuck.

Of course, the card reader was pretty much a solid unit. After much dis-assembling of the laptop, and much failure, the server admin stuck the tech sized tweezers in, pushed the ends apart with a screwdriver, and managed to grab the card and remove it. The card was scratched beyond repair, but we saved the card reader.