so much love for paypal.

the lovely website called paypal being announced as “the safer, easier way to get paid by customers around the world” has been failing pretty hard at life lately. and how so? well, for the nine days or so, i have not been able to see the addresses of the users who placed an order on impolite after the fifteenth of february. when i click on transaction details from an order everything shows up; what has been ordered, the name of the person, the date, the payment informations, etc. but then, just no address. how am i supposed to ship their order? so i call paypal for the first time concerning the issue about four days ago, and wait about fifteen minutes on the help line until a man finally answers, and just to make you understand how painful that fifteen minutes was, let me explain how it works when you call paypal. you get an annoying robot on the line asking you many questions, and let me say it again, it is a robot, not a person. and in you’ve got to answer her questions out loud. if she understood right, or thought she heard something similar to the choices she gave you, she will repeat it to you, and then process the request. so for ten minutes, i’m just trying to get around that random menu with countless options for the sake of getting a hold of the help line, and then i get pissed off and randomly press the zero, usually that gives you somebody on the other end right away. and it worked! wow, go me. after pressing the zero i wait for about five minutes for someone to pickup. the man answers by saying hi, and asks for my name. and then i explain my issue to him for about five minutes, and once i’m done; silence. and when he finally says something back he sounds confused and lost. so i ask what the issue is, and what the hell i can do to get the addresses from my buyers. he tells me that “paypal is not allowed to send the addresses to an email by request in order to protect the buyers privacy.” alright, i get it, but i’ve been on the phone for 22 days confirming my identity, obviously i’m the owner of the account and not some random person. then he doesn’t really know what to do so he explains to me how a computer works by telling me to clean my cookies, check if i’m able to see the addresses on firefox instead (because apparently safari sucks, wait, is it safari or their website which sucks?), and then he makes me go on a windows computer in order to try the paypal website with internet explorer, and whatever what i try, the addresses don’t show up. obviously i did try everything the past days before calling. so once i tell him nothing works, he seems even more lost and confused, and puts me on hold for about seventeen minutes because he had to go get his “superior”. i wait, forced to listen to their stupid commercials and music on that waiting line. when he comes back he apologizes that he has been gone for so long. i honestly start to feel like the whole thing is a stupid joke. i express those feelings to him, and he tells me now that apparently the technical team of paypal knows about the issue and has been working on it, or that it has a ticket already in order to be expected eventually. huh, hello, i need my addresses now and not in a month, professionalism please?

i stay on the phone with him for another twenty minutes trying to convince him to email me the addresses, or just fix the issue. and he won’t. after a while he says that he can do me a big “favor” and tell me the addresses by phone. wait a minute. could you imagine someone spelling you out 45 long addresses by phone? i say no thank you, and then he apologizes for the hundredth time about the fact that his help is totally useless and tells me that the issue should be fixed soon.

three days later, the issue is still not fixed. i still cannot get the addresses. they won’t show up! what does that mean? well, i’m not able to send the orders that have been processed over 13 days ago, which means the customers, my customers, have been waiting all that time for absolutely no reason, and will then get off on me about how my shipping is slow and retarded and that my business is badly organized. (i know i heard it all before. people tend to think that you receive the item the next day when you buy online and pay the little amount of $4.50 for international shipping-shipping canada to usa-and obviously next day shipping would be around fifty dollars if not more. so they then email me two days after buying an item that my website is a scam and that they’ll sue me. it’s much fun to deal with, trust me.) i am angry about the whole issue. and decide to call paypal again, i get some lady on the line this time, and she has no idea what to do about it, and seems even more confused than the man i got three days ago so she transfers my call to another lady, who was very nice, but not too helpful once again. she tells me that she can send me all the addresses by email, and tells me that i’ve got to stay on hold while she does so and that it might take a while. so i wait about twenty minutes on hold, and then she gets back on the phone to tell me that apparently her computer crashes in the middle of what she was doing, and that she has to start over again. how professional, go paypal, go! p! a! y! p! a! l! paypal! go! go! and she tells me that she will have it sent to me in the next hours.

today, 24 hours later, i check my email, and i got some email saying they aren’t able to send the addresses for that privacy excuse they gave to me before. sorry for venting about this issue, but how ridicule is it? a huge company like paypal can’t even get things fixed properly and in time. i’m sure even myspace is quicker at fixing technical issues, which is amazingly surprising.

and if you did order from the fifteenth of february to today, i’m terribly sorry. the issue, as paypal told me, should be resolved very soon by their technical issue team. this has been stressing me out a lot, and you should know that i tried everything i could do in order to fix the problem, but just can’t do anything. when you aren’t a multimillionaire company or when you’re a teenager, you’re rarely taken seriously by others. things are unfair like that, and there’s nothing we can do about it. well there is actually something we can do, fight and express our thoughts !

thank you for your time, and patience.

hatable.

i miss the sun terribly. i miss it. miss miss miss it. and it’s been proven several times before that winter causes depressions, and it’s the season where people usually have breakdowns, bad moods, etc. and i don’t doubt it. everybody seems so weak and depressed lately, so much that it even affects the people who aren’t. which means everybody is pretty much fucked. please winter, if you can hear me, i’m asking you to go away, i’ve been enduring you long enough, and i want summer, or spring at least. i wanna be able to put my coat away, i wanna be able to feel the sun on my skin, i wanna be able to go to the beach, i wanna be able to swim outside, i wanna be able to take photographs outside without my hands dying.

i was reading some random blogs yesterday, and i randomly came across a blog with an interesting entry. i’m not sure if the person of that blog even wrote it themselves since there were no comments, or barely anything on their blog. plus the rest of their blog wasn’t even in english. anyway, this is what i found:

You can hate a person just by looking at her/him: the hair, the smile, the look, the clothes. Anything can trigger negative feelings. You just have to go with that flow and any proof that person is not horrible will have no influence on you.

I don’t know if we could say a good thing about every person we’ve met so far, maybe they haven’t impressed us in a positive way, but we can most certainly bitch about all of them. There must have been something to annoy us at one point. It’s only human! For every nice gesture and person who smiled thanks to you, there is an unhappy person, someone who feels neglected or discriminated against.

It’s human to be annoyed, but above that, I think it’s human to be hatable (being available for hate).

We are hatable with every gesture, every choice we make and tear we drop. Because all these are movements on a map filled with people and, inevitably, when we go one way we get closer to some and estrange from others. We are, in essence, controversial.

Some are more controversial than others, true. It depends on how far we move from the center of the map or, in other words, how extremist we are. And how much we show of our personality we show to others. But still, we are always lovable to some and hatable to others.

That’s the breakthrough. We’re both good and evil, pleasant and repulsive, smart and stupid. It only depends on where we’re standing when we’re judging. There is no black and white. And that’s why the big picture is important: we need to see the balance between the smiles and the tears someone provokes. And the reasons. The intentions. The more information we have, the better we see the tone of gray.

Anyway, we are hatable. That’s our most human trait. Every person stands for the things another one hates. That’s life.

i read it a few times last night, and all of today, i was kinda thinking about it. for some reasons, i feel like i could’ve written something similar myself because i feel the exact same way. and i’m sure it happened to you before. we’ve all disliked people, and we’ve all been disliked as well. for good reasons like silly reasons. we always say we don’t choose who we love, but we actually do. you love that person that matches all those characteristics that you’re looking for in a person. and once you find something you don’t like in someone, let’s take for example jealousy, then you’ll start questioning yourself about that person, and you’ll wonder if they’re right for you. in friendships like relationships. but then, some will say we have to learn how to appreciate someone’s flaws in order to deserve them, which is true, but at what extent would we have to do so? when it comes to a point where you have to endure someone, it might not be a good idea to simply put up with the whole situation. or let’s say you feel like something is treating you unfairly, why would you just simply put up with it? and i know, a lot of people will stick around with them, no matter how that person will treat them. some will say “but i love him”, which makes me wonder what love is. how can you love someone who doesn’t have anything good to offer to you?

i know, it always seems like i’m analyzing situations, and maybe i am. i think it’s interesting sometimes to simply stop for a few minutes, and look back at things, and analyze them. it makes you grow as a person, and usually makes you a better person. why? because we learn from our mistakes. and i’ve got a few commenters complaining that my posts are too long, and that i have too much to say. as i’ve always said, this is my blog, my thoughts, and i never expected anyone to appreciate them, want to read them, nor understand them. when you write your diary, do you wonder if your entries are too long? do you wonder if other people will understand it? no, i don’t think so, because you’re actually writing it for yourself, and not other people. well, i think that a blog kinda works the same way. you write down your thoughts, and that’s it. you don’t care what people will think. some might be inspired by your writing while others will truly dislike it.

and on this, i’m gonna wish you a good end of the day. my parents ordered pizza and it just got here!

school drama.

last night, after the oscars, i decide to check on my school’s website to see if my monday classes were cancelled. they always end up being cancelled, and i hate waking up early for nothing. while i do so, i decide to check my school email, which i never check since teachers usually never contact you on there. new messages in inbox! i read the newest one, and it’s from my integrating activity teacher, that one who always cancels classes, or end them after half an hour. i open it, and surprise. what a lovely message she sent me.

You are at present failing your IA course. Today I travelled in from Pincourt (2 hours each way) for the sole purpose of meeting with you at 10:00 this morning, the meeting time you signed up for.

If your intention is to fail the course, please go away and do so quietly without wasting my time.

Thank-you.

i read it once, and then read it a second time since i wasn’t sure i got it right the first time. at first i’m asking myself, is that email supposed to be rude? and then i do realize it is rude. and it makes me angry. i don’t like when teachers think they’re so superior to students, and i’m sure she didn’t even expect me to reply, or expected a reply along the lines of “oh my god, i am so sorry. you’re amazing, and so much cooler than i am. you teach integrating activity, and i’m terribly jealous. that’s the reason why i missed our appointment. again, sorry, sorry and sorry.” but no, i don’t feel like being nice. i’m angry because whenever i’d wake up at six am in order to get to her eight am class, i’d get to school only to get to an empty class, cancelled class. and she always seems so unorganized, sometimes i wonder if she’s a real teacher. i decide i’m gonna reply, and won’t censure myself. she can’t fail a student for personal reasons, right? fuck it, i type down what i feel, and press send.

so terribly sorry for wasting your time,
i did feel the same way every time i’d get to school (45 mins each way) just to walk up to an empty classroom, or a class that ends 25 minutes after it started.

i believe you did have many other appointments that day with students, and i feel that trying to make me feel that bad for not showing up with sentences such as ” for the sole purpose of meeting with you ” was a little dramatic and uncalled for.

clearly my intention is not to fail the course, i don’t intend on walking away quietly anytime soon. i admit it was my mistake to forget about our appointment, which i thought was this week, and not last week.

this is my fourth semester, and i’ve never had a course organized like this one, nor had any issues with a teacher before. it needs some getting used to. i shall be using this school email everyday from now on.

i believe we will need to discuss this issue in person soon.

so sorry again,
and thank you.

Alexandre.

still waiting for her to reply.