Ah, chargeback heaven. A quick reminder for those of you who haven’t been reading carefully. A couple of weeks ago a client of mine – whom I won’t name, as he’s a nice guy and doesn’t deserve to be associated with all the swearing that’s about to happen – did an $800 credit card chargeback on a fee he’d paid me three months previously for copywriting his corporate brochure.
The chargeback was a mistake. It wasn’t even his mistake – it was an error at Am*x. Two weeks later, I still haven’t got the money back. But then, neither has he.
So where’s the fucking money? Ah ha! It’s in the financial limbo that cash travels through when it’s transferred between accounts. Modern electronic networking means that money can be transferred instantly. Or rather it could be: banks and other financial institutions still insist on a ‘clearing period’, usually of three days.
(Unless you deal with First Direct, that is, in which case it will be much more than three days. First Direct works out transfers by employing dyscalculic gibbons to move beans from one pile to another. Sometimes they drop the beans, or get hungry and eat them, or just plain lose count and have to shuffle them back into equal piles and start again.)
Anyway, during those three days the money is neither in your account nor in the account from whence it came. It is – to borrow a theory from The Guardian’s Chris Addison – on the back of a donkey on the way to Tashkent.
And that’s when the aforementioned banks and financial institutions are playing nicely. When they’re not playing nicely they stick their fingers up their arses and refuse to acknowledge the existence of (i) the transaction, (ii) the people involved, and (iii) this strange ‘money’ commodity we keep talking about – (‘nominal values printed on pieces of paper? Sorry sir, never heard of that. Over here at Am*x we get along just fine bartering raccoon skins.’)
So the eight hundred bucks currently belong neither to me, nor to my client, nor to Am*x. They're out there somewhere, roaming the savannah.
But simply depriving me of my cash isn’t enough for Am*x. They have just charged me $38 for asking for my money back.
Read that again, carefully. That’s not ‘$38 to get my money back’ – I’d happily part with that amount to recover what they owe me. No, they’ve charged me $38 just for the pleasure of asking them, even though they’ve been told by both me and my client that they (not we) have screwed up.
Aren’t they nice?
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Published by Earthman
on Friday, September 09, 2005 at 11:58 PM. The chargeback was a mistake. It wasn’t even his mistake – it was an error at Am*x. Two weeks later, I still haven’t got the money back. But then, neither has he.
So where’s the fucking money? Ah ha! It’s in the financial limbo that cash travels through when it’s transferred between accounts. Modern electronic networking means that money can be transferred instantly. Or rather it could be: banks and other financial institutions still insist on a ‘clearing period’, usually of three days.
(Unless you deal with First Direct, that is, in which case it will be much more than three days. First Direct works out transfers by employing dyscalculic gibbons to move beans from one pile to another. Sometimes they drop the beans, or get hungry and eat them, or just plain lose count and have to shuffle them back into equal piles and start again.)
Anyway, during those three days the money is neither in your account nor in the account from whence it came. It is – to borrow a theory from The Guardian’s Chris Addison – on the back of a donkey on the way to Tashkent.
And that’s when the aforementioned banks and financial institutions are playing nicely. When they’re not playing nicely they stick their fingers up their arses and refuse to acknowledge the existence of (i) the transaction, (ii) the people involved, and (iii) this strange ‘money’ commodity we keep talking about – (‘nominal values printed on pieces of paper? Sorry sir, never heard of that. Over here at Am*x we get along just fine bartering raccoon skins.’)
So the eight hundred bucks currently belong neither to me, nor to my client, nor to Am*x. They're out there somewhere, roaming the savannah.
But simply depriving me of my cash isn’t enough for Am*x. They have just charged me $38 for asking for my money back.
Read that again, carefully. That’s not ‘$38 to get my money back’ – I’d happily part with that amount to recover what they owe me. No, they’ve charged me $38 just for the pleasure of asking them, even though they’ve been told by both me and my client that they (not we) have screwed up.
Aren’t they nice?
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