Hopefully this will be the last of my moving woes… My bank account with Wachovia (which doesn’t operate anywhere near the bay) was still active. I decided to give it a few weeks to make sure that everything on it had absolutely cleared, then make a payment with everything left in the account (leaving $0.25) onto one of my credit cards. As soon as that payment went through, the plan was to then close the account. I remembered my plan last Monday, after the account had been dormant for about two weeks. I made a big payment to one of my credit cards… and waited. I called on Wednesday to close my account, but the Wachovia guy showed that the transfer was still pending. I called back on Friday, only to be told that there was a hold on my account and that my balance was negative.It seems I’d missed one auto-billing thing–my web hosting account with Yahoo!. The payment hadn’t posted yet, and the woman on the phone laid out a few options for me:
- Deposit some money before it posted (~300 miles away)
- Wire some money into the account (~$30 wire transfer fee)
- Convince the charge to credit the account back.
On Wednesday, the guy would’ve been all too happy to close my account–saying something to the effect of: “That money you sent out hasn’t cleared yet, so if I close the account now they’ll get a notice saying the funds were denied.” Essentially, as if I’d never made the transaction. Why they couldn’t do the same thing with this one… who knows. With options (1) and (2) both being pretty undesirable, I was left with option (3).
To be fair, I like Yahoo!. Their hosting plan is way too expensive for my needs–the smallest one is the “Small Business” plan for $11.95 a month (meaning I was scheduled to be overdrawn by $11.70). I use about 1% of my disk space and usually use up about 1% of my transfer–overkill big time. I really don’t like Geocities, though (which has one for around $8 I think). I’m actually using Dreamhost (aka creepy pyramid-scheme host) now for another project, and while the price is right and the service is pretty decent… the speed just sucks. That’s fine, though, I just wanted to prototype a project in Ruby on Rails (which Y! doesn’t support). For my every day needs, the $11.95 a month buys me laziness. Yahoo!’s interface is pretty easy to use, they support in-browser editing of files, in-browser ftp (under 5 megs anyway), and it always works–fast.I don’t exactly need fantastic reliability, but it doesn’t hurt. I even dumped my crappy old layout and used one of their “sitebuilder” templates, which at least looks pretty decent (even if it’s a major pain in the ass to customize).
The problem with any large company, though, is that they’re not really set up for personal transactions. Because it’s Yahoo!, though, they at least have live customer support over the phone–unfortunately, it’s the kind of typically incompetent outsourced customer support most of us have come to know and love. Before I called, I went online and updated my credit card information so that it would bill my new checking account. When the woman answered, I explained that I was in the process of closing that account and switching banks, and that I needed her to refund the account that had been charged (Wachovia) and re-bill the new account (WaMu). After putting me on hold for 10 minutes, her response was: “We don’t have that capability here.”
My response was simple–I called her bluff: “What happens if I just cancel my service?” Well then, yes, that would give me a refund. The only hitch is that all my data (this blog, all my old school projects, my databases) would be wiped. At that point, I was pretty pissed off at the whole situation–so I told her to just do it. Cancel everything and issue me a refund. She said that she couldn’t do it from there, but that she could walk me through the process on the Yahoo! web site. So… if they can’t handle billing matters, and they can’t modify accounts… what the hell are they there for?
Finally fed up with Yahoo! (after all, I’m only willing to overpay as long as it’s EASY and CONVENIENT), I asked her how I transferred my domains (I registered two through Y!, though they don’t allow you to host multiple domains under one account–something they didn’t mention until AFTER I’d bought the second domain) to my new host, Dreamhost. Her response was to put me on hold for another 5 minutes. After asking around, or maybe just taking a smoke break, her response was this: “I’m showing that the domain is registered through March of 2008. After that, there is a 75-day waiting period, and you could then try to get it again.”
What!?
As calmly as I could muster, I explained to her that this was MY DOMAIN that I had BOUGHT (okay…registered), and that I just wanted to TRANSFER it to my new host. Apparently if you cancel your service plan, Yahoo! just decides they’ll hang on to your domain for you until it expires. She put me on hold for another five minutes. By this time, I’d already come to the conclusion that this chick was completely incompetent. When she got back, she at least had an idea of what was going on. If I wanted to keep my domain, I couldn’t just cancel my account. I had to DOWNGRADE my service from the “Small Business” plan to the “Domain Hosting Plan” ($9.95 a year). And then, calmly as an aside (as if reading from a piece of paper and not actually comprehending what she was saying), she finally said something helpful: “You will be refunded the pro-rated amount of your current plan and then re-billed for your new plan.”
Wait. Rewind.
They’re going to refund the current charge…and then rebill me. Which is EXACTLY what I had asked her to do in the first place. I pointed that out. Her response: “Oh, yeah, I guess that might work. I never thought about it.” But I’d still lose all my data. I asked her what would happend if I UPGRADED my account (the next one up is $19.95/month plan). She had to put me on hold for another 5 minutes. When she got back, she said it worked the same way–a pro-rated refund and then the new charge. So, in other words, it did exactly what I wanted in the first place (before being on the phone with a nitwit for 30 minutes). Could she do it there, though? Nope. I had to hang up and log in to do it from the web control panel.
Then the waiting game began. Yahoo! billed me on Friday (07/13) and I upgraded that same day. Had they billed me on 07/12 and issued the refund on 07/13, it would’ve been pro-rated–that is to say, 30/31 * $11.95, or $11.57. Meaning I would’ve still been overdrawn by $0.13. Yahoo! doesn’t update their billing history for at least 24 hours after the payment was made, so I could do nothing but cross my fingers. Luckily, I went camping all weekend and could at least forget about it. Yesterday, I checked my billing history on Yahoo!. It showed that they had indeed refunded the entire $11.95 and then re-billed my current card $19.95. I immediately downgraded back to the Small Business plan (meaning that this month I’ll probably pay something like $12.50). Yesterday, I called Wachovia–they showed no record of the refund, but the charge still hadn’t posted either.
I checked my balance this morning, and it was as it should be–$0.25. With no more incoming charges. I called Wachovia immediately and had them cancel my account. Their policy is to mail the remaining funds (which is why I’d wanted to empty it out in the first place–I didn’t want a $500 check getting lost in the mail). I told her that $0.25 was less than the cost of a stamp and they could just put it in the Wachovia piggy bank or donate it to charity, but apparently their policy doesn’t allow for that sort of thing. So I’ll be getting a big fat check for $0.25 and, more importantly, a little piece of mind.
Re-iterating the moral of the story from my banking woes a few weeks ago… if you’re ever moving cross country, find a bank that exists in both places and sign up for an account three months before you go. Your life will be less stressful that way.