For years I have refused to join PayPal for a number of reasons. I finally joined when eBay required (so it said) that all payments be made through PayPal. And the trouble began. First I had to activate my account. To do that the e-mail gave me a long distance number - it took me 35 minutes to get the information to an "account representative" who I suspect was residing in India. I had to pay for that 35 minutes. Then today I received an e-mail that said I had an account balance of $10.96 and to go to paypal.com to "view" my bill. I went. The balance there was shown as $0.00. I went to help but found that to contact a rep via e-mail I had to use one of the several subject and sub subject matters. None were applicable to my question of what was the bill and how do I pay it. I went then to the telephone number (again a non 800 number). I was introduced to a robot that asked a number of questions and ultimately it gave up and let me speak to a live human being (again someone who was obviously not
from the good old USA). I could not understand her as she spoke a mile a minute. Finally after another to minutes she gave me her manager who spoke the same language. After another 10 minutes when I still could not find out why I received a bill when the account balance was shown to be "$0" she said that I would receive a bill in the mail within two weeks. The e-mail notice said I had to pay it within 10 days. Total time on my money: 31 minutes. Total information gained: 0. I'm so glad PayPal is conserving costs by 1) refusing to give out an 800 number (until pressed to the wall) and 2) outsourcing live operators who cannot be understood. Bah Humbug! A pox on PayPal!