Fun with PayPal support

I love support hotlines in general but the PayPal (and the eBay hotline too) is one of the best hotline ever. πŸ™„

I’m having problems with their website because some genius designer decided to hard code some pixel positions an sizes into it. Well, usually things work on most desktops but on high resolution displays you are working with a different font size. This makes some websites unusable. No big deal I thought. Just take a screenshot and mail the webmaster (not Denis this time πŸ˜‰ ).

So I sent a mail to webmaster@paypal.com and got a friendly response alΓ‘ “Our webmaster doesn’t read his inbox. Use the support hotlines.” Mhm. πŸ™ I initially wrote to the webmaster because that’s how it usually work. If you really want to get things fixed, don’t call or mail a hotline, mail the webmaster. πŸ˜‰

Nevertheless, I decided to send a mail to the hotline. Or at least I tried but I had to use a funny web fronted for this. At least they got a category for website problems. Unfortunately, the web form didn’t allow me to attach screenshots. πŸ™ Now I got a little confused. I should mention that the first item on that form was a box with help items and the first help item was “How do I create a screenshot in Windows?”.

Mhm. So there is a form for submitting questions which includes instructions for taking screenshots but the form doesn’t allow attaching files. πŸ˜• Nice piece of engineering. 😯 BTW, does anybody see the relation to Joel’s keynote at EclipseCon? I do. πŸ˜†

I said to myself: “Guy, don’t give up. Just tell them your problem with the screen resolution and the website issues and offer them to send a screenshot by mail.” And I wrote my problem in that form.

Hi! I’m having a problem with your website. It seems that this problem is caused by a different font size and display resolution I’m using on my Dell notebook. It’s configured to 120dpi in the Windows Display dialog. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to attach a screenshot your help form. But I can send the screenshot by mail. This should help your website developers to identify the problem.

Just a couple of minutes later I got a response. And guess what they suggested?

In this case you need to delete your cookies and your cache, so that you are able to login to your account again.

ROTFL!

One thought on “Fun with PayPal support

  1. We read all the mail we get, and reply to most of it. If you type fast and you know what to answer, going through a large Inbox doesn’t take up that much time. From where I sit, people are genuinely glad to see a human being answer their e-mail, even if it’s just to say “that’s a question for our newsgroups”.

    D.

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