It worried me how much my life resembles Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Ok so I went to place the order for my new computer with CCL last night. However it still had my invoice address set as Bodington Hall and you can’t change it online. So this morning I rang customer services. They updated it to my home address for me but because my card is registered to my university address they told me that I would have to phone sales up and order it manually.
So I phoned sales up and went through all the components over the phone. They told me they were having credit card problems and passed me through to accounts (as expected) who went through a few details with me and told me that my credit card was being declined and I had to phone Egg up.
I phoned Egg up who told me the reason it had been declined was the order was more than my available balance. Indeed the amount of the purchase was more than it was showing on my shopping cart.
Now I had a problem. I didn’t have enough money on my Egg card to make the purchase. I didn’t have enough money left in my bank account because I had moved it all over to my Egg card to pay for the computer though. It’s my sound system all over again. At least I didn’t think I had enough money in the account, I couldn’t check my bank account because my laptop is dead. At least it would allow me to take a photo of the error – or it would if my camera would let me take any photos but it won’t.
I phone CCL back and explain the problem and they eventually realise that it is because the over the phone orders use trade counter prices rather than internet prices and I have to order via the internet to get the discount price.
I eventually make it on to my bank account to find I have some money spare which allows me to make the purchase on my Lloyds TSB credit card but will need to move some more funds into my bank account as soon as possible to make sure it covers it. Also I was trying not to use my Llyods TSB card as I’m not sure the direct debit is setup yet and it means I will probably have too much money on my Egg card as they will probably take a direct debit payment anyway and there is no easy slash free way to transfer money back to my bank account from my Egg card.
After them declining my Llyods TSB credit card once they finally accept it and I reach the confirm your order screen which informs me that my invoice address hasn’t changed and still says Bodington Hall. I’m back on the phone with CCL customer services.
After 10 minutes on hold I decide to put my phone on speaker phone disrupting my speaker system so I have to turn it off. 19 minutes on hold and someone finally answers. They explain that whoever updated my billing address when I called before actually messed it up so it didn’t update properly. He sorts it for me and tells me to give it 5 minutes for it to update and then go through the checkout again.
So I give it 5 minutes and head to the checkout system again. At which point I come accross a server error preventing me from going any further. On the upside it’s now displayed on the rogues gallery on Server Problems Maybe?
Giving it 10 minutes to fix itself, I’m still getting. I take a closer look at the error and it seems to be a database fault. My suspicion is that when they cancelled my phone order they either also cancelled my basket order online or just wiped all the pending orders on my account or something. I log in using Internet Explorer, choose a new product in my empty basket and try to go through the checkout – it works.
So I go back to Firefox, open up all the product pages, empty my basket and begin adding everything again. I then refresh my basket. It’s empty again. I work out it’s because it has logged me out so I logged back in and it all re-appears. Finally it lets me go to the checkout. You have to appreciate that each step is taking quite a while because CCL is going strangly slow in recent times.
I finally click confirm, it should finally be all done!
It’s not. I get some ClickSafe registration from Llyods TSB. It’s non-optional. I go through this and open up my email client because it told me it needed email activation. No email came. However, I did get an order confirmation email from CCL so hopefully it’s finally gone through! And all it took me was 2 hours on the phone to people.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.