I thought I better warn you that the website could go off line at the end of November. I’m currently swapping emails with Arnold at Tripod – we’re on first name terms you know – to try and stop getting ex-communicated in my prime, but I don’t hold out much hope.

The problem? Well some of you will remember Geocities throwing a wobbily last year when I linked my site to my blog. Yes I know, I’ve got such a cheek. Geocities didn’t think they’d bother telling me that they don’t allow links to blogs, even through other sites do it and don’t appear to have a problem, so they just deleted everything. Which, let’s be honest was a bit of a bugger.

Never mind, never one to fall at the first hurdle I got myself a tripod plus site, for which I pay the princely sum of £3 a month. There’s a lot of talk about the pros and cons of paying for your site - authors write the stories for free so they shouldn’t have to pay for readers to read them as well. Personally I don't have a problem, this is my hobby – when I actually write that is. Most people pay more than that for a round of drinks in a pub on a weekly basis and by having a paid site I don’t suffer from the dreaded pop-ups. But more than all of that, I have peace of mind that some swine isn’t just going to pull the plug on me without warning.

Or I thought I did.

As in most of these things, service providers insist on payment via a credit card and we all know that credit cards come with expiry dates. Well mine expires at the end of this month and Tripod ever so kindly pointed this out for me. To ensure that service wasn’t disrupted I needed to update my card details. Wasn’t that nice of them? Orange, who supply my broadband hadn’t said a dicky bird.

Never mind, I logged onto the Orange site and within seconds, just seconds, I’d entered my new card details and they had been accepted and updated. Now this is where it all goes wrong - I very stupidly assumed that Tripod would be the same and to a certain extent it is. I followed their instructions to the letter and came upon a small problem. They won't accept my new card.

Rather than explain it all again, I’ll just show you a copy of the email to Arnold – who, bless him, continues to send me the same response just wording it slightly differently each time:

Dear Arnold

Thank you for replying to my query. Unfortunately the information you have sent me is exactly the same as the information that I received with the notice to update my card details; it doesn’t address my problem. Which I’ll explain to you in the hope that you'll be able to assist me:

1. When I try and put the new expiration date in for my new credit card I get this error message:

Credit card pre-validation failed due to invalid or rejected number.

I can even tell you why it failed. You don't have a box asking for the new card’s verification number; it only asks me for the new expiry date. This unique number changes with every new card you receive. So basically although I've changed the year, the verification number no longer matches up as you haven’t asked me to change it. I’ve given you my new expiry date; you could try yourself and prove me wrong if possible – I could live with that.

2. The obvious way around this - or so I thought. There you go, that will teach me - is to click the link to ‘manage your payments’ and add the new card. Ha ha. This time I get this error message:

Tried to create an account which already exists (like duplicate credit card)

They're right you know, I did, the card number is in fact my account number and that bit is obviously the same as my old card. Sorry to repeat myself here, but it’s the expiry date and verification number that has changed.

All I want to do is pay. Orange didn't have a problem updating my card, they want my money. I can't be the only customer who has had this problem, please can I pay? I really do want to keep my Tripod Plus account with you and not get ex-communicated come the end of November.

Yours in hope,

Sue

This by the way is the third email that I’ve sent them, each time he quotes the basic reply of 'do it this way' – they just can’t seem to accept the fact that it doesn’t work.

So, I’ve emailed him back yet again with screen prints for each of the steps he’s told me to take (just to prove to him that I am doing as he's told me) and I live in hope that he’ll get his head around the fact that their site has a big problem in it's design and it's not me. I don’t hold out much hope, so if I do disappear come the end of the month, please address all complaints to Arnold at Tripod. I would dearly love to know if he’s actually look at our site.


++++

Flickr is addictive and work sucks.

That’s it really :)