Today was my early day again. It was a good day. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'd still be better off dead, but hey, give me my minor peaks among the many valleys, would you?
My nephews are starting school again next week. They will be going half days every other day, but not on the same odd days. Part of me wonders what it's all about, Alfie. But this too shall pass.
After hearing that damned Harry Styles song dozens of times this year--and pretty much always changing the station (you see, kids, I still listen to the radio, because I am a hundred years old. But when a hundred years old you reach, look as young you will not), because hey, who needs it?--I finally ended up stuck someplace where I couldn't change it . . . and darned if I didn't like the song.
My, how the shitey have fallen.
Because I have to do my runs before I go to my cousin's house on Tuesdays, it means running during the--eeeeeeeeieeeie!--daylight. But the upside of that is that I actually see other joggers when I'm out and about . . . and they're nearly always female. Why is that, I wonder. Is it because our hateful patriarchal society has inculcated upon women that they must be in shape, whereas men are free to get fat and still succeed in life? Is it because men exercise in gyms and garages and on treadmills and women actually use the outdoors as their gymnasiums? Is it because our hateful patriarchal society has trained me to ignore the male joggers that I see and only notice the female ones? Or are there just way more females than males in this world, the way Brigham Young intended it to be?
Whatever the answer, an attractive young woman was jogging in my direction, and instead of fleeing for the safety of the indoors as they usually do when they see me, she smiled and kept on running. I hope she lives to be a hundred too.
A few years ago, when I was just starting out selling on eBay, they bought PayPal (which is an online banking site where you can send and receive money), and promptly announced that all eBay transactions would now have to be paid using PayPal. No more money orders or personal checks (which I did accept), no more "carefully-concealed cash" (which I did accept)--you had to pay using PayPal, which charged a fee for every received payment. So suddenly, in addition to eBay taking a fee for using their site (a Final Value Fee), and in addition to what you pay to have an eBay Store (if you do), you had to pay a transaction fee to PayPal.
I could've stopped selling then--I hope a lot of people did--but I didn't. I was over a barrel. Where else was I going to go, Yardseller? It was just the price of doing business--the vig, so to speak.
And then last year, PayPal announced that they were going to stop refunding their transaction fees if you gave someone (or were forced to give someone) a refund. That was something of a blight, because I'd always played ball with the people who had purchased multiple items but didn't ask for a combined invoice with cheaper shipping, or those who had buyer's remorse and wanted to back out of the transaction, or lied and said it was not them that purchased the item, or even the lovely folks who lied about what they got and demanded a refund after the fact. Now, I would have to eat even more of that money than I ever did before, so I changed my own policy of giving people shipping refunds if they overpaid, because I still had to pay PayPal, even if I made nothing out of the transaction.*
But now, in August, eBay has stopped using PayPal (there's probably an interesting--but infuriating--story behind that), and users pay eBay directly, then in three to five business days, they send me the money. On paper, that's great, and I don't even mind having to wait to be paid, since I should be getting paid today for what I sold last week, and next week, today's payments will get transferred to my bank. But for a decade, I've shipped everything using PayPal, and that's still how the process is set up on eBay today. But I have no money in my PayPal account anymore, because the payments are no longer going there, so my savings account gets charged. No problem, you say, except that I am only allowed six transactions on my savings account per month before I am charged a fee . . .
. . . and that means that I am already over the six transactions, and am racking up these obnoxious fees right and left. So I changed my fallback payment source on PayPal to be my checking account instead . . . but it kept charging my savings account. So I changed the payment source to be my credit card . . . but it kept charging my savings account. So I tried to remove my savings account from my PayPal account altogether, so it would no longer BE ABLE to do so . . . and it wouldn't let me because I still have pending transactions going to that savings account.
It went from a lose-lose situation to a lose-lose-lose situation. Not sure why I'm telling you all thi--
Oh yeah, I didn't feel like working for a little while. Well, mission accomplished.
I accidentally called a girl "honey" today. That has literally never happened to me before. It's something I've only been called myself by my mother and waitresses at diners and truck stops. It's not like I'm mortified or anything (somebody once told me the story about accidentally calling someone the British slang for cigarettes, and I couldn't get it out of my mind, the horror of that . . . which this can't be nearly as bad as since it's a term--What? It is? Oh, sorry. I didn't realize. Maybe I'll hold off publishing this one for a while), but it does make me think I've been writing too many days in a row.
Either that or I should be institutionalized for a while. Or both.
Sit-ups Today: 123
Sit-ups In August: 2315
Went to the park again, just as the sun was getting low in the sky. I didn't have much to write, and texted Big that I only had sixty-six words written. By the time he let me know I only needed six hundred to go, I had sort of got into the rhythm of it all, and made it nearly to a thousand before deciding it was time to take off. If I end the story where I was thinking I would, I should be done either tomorrow or the day after. This may turn out to be a really lame place to end the story, though. Guess I should decide whether the point of the tale is the hatchling itself or the relationship between the boy and the girl.
Words Today: 1051
Words In August: 10,880
I just glanced at the clock and realized it was 3:41am. Whoops again.
*This is something I suffered greatly for recently when an eBay hiccup suddenly made available a bunch of items I had listed in October, and hadn't had in months, and almost twenty of them sold before I realized what was happening. I had to swallow all of those fees, and PayPal just beat off harder in the corner.
No comments:
Post a Comment