I made a special order for a friend yesterday. She wanted to offer a gift to her son’s teacher and to the taxi-bus driver.
Sometimes people ask me to make a special gift basket with different items that they pick up from the catalog.
Here, I added a reusable and ultra light shopping bag to a 6 pack of apple candles (the apple is often associated to teachers) and wrapped it all with natural raffia.
When renewing my stock of MP8 clothes-line hangers, I was surprised to learn that there will not be any new cargo arrival nor stock production in any near future, because it seams that the patent owner has decided not to renew the production. I don’t know the reasons behind this, but still I purchased the balance of the lot, i.e. 32 packs of 3, beige.
So if you’re still hesitating about purchasing these wonderfully useful clothes-line hangers, don’t wait anymore, because these are the last ones on the market…
Buy MP8 clothes-line hangers here
I had another attempted fraud on GiftOsphere.ca. That’s not new… and I blogged about it before, but what I DON’T UNDERSTAND is why it’s so complicated to report a fraud. I lost at least 30 minutes on the phone with many people, with no result…
Contacting Mastercard
The attempted fraud was made with a MasterCard. Not knowing where to start, as any good webgirl would do, I started with their website. I could find nothing regarding this particular situation, so I called the general number for Canada. There was the usual “Please press one, Please press 2….” I finally spoke to a real person, was transferred a few times, and winded up with a “fraud specialist”, who told me there was no central telephone number to report an attempted fraud with a MasterCard on a website. He told me that I (ME?) must call the bank that issued the card, and report it myself. I don’t have the full 16 digit credit card number that was used, but he still can give me the 1-800 number of the bank.
Contacting City Bank
I called the 1-800 number that the guy at MasterCard gave me. Since I don’t have the 16 digit number of the card, I can’t enter it… so I pressed “0″ quite a few times! I said I wanted to report an attempted fraud on one of their client’s card, and was told that they couldn’t do anything without the full 16 numbers. I said that I had the date and time (to the second), the amount. Even with that, it seems, they CAN’T do anything… (or won’t?)
I was told that I (me again) have to contact my online banking provider, and ask them to retrieve the full credit card number from their system, and then call City Bank again.
Contacting Psi Gate
I called my online banking provider, but all the lines were busy for about 15 minutes. Then I pushed the hanging-up button by mistake… and that was it for me.
This reminds me of an old Astérix movie with “the nut house”
To conclude:
1. Nobody wants’ to hear about an attempted online fraud
2. Someone will soon receive his monthly statement, will have tons of problems, but will never know that some honest e-commerce owner has taken time to try to warn him, but that his credit card issuing bank didn’t care.
Thanks to Marie-Julie, and to the comments from this blogger for making me discover the origin of the fork on this blog. The funny thing is that I had already been to this blog, but I didn’t remember until now.
On a more personal note…
I recently found old pictures of a child’s building blocks game I had bought approx. 7 years ago. I had taken the pictures because I couldn’t believe my own eyes…
My mother was a professional translator. She used to keep pictures and texts of extreme and funny translation errors for her own personal museum. Anyway, we were shopping one day, and we came upon this game that looked interesting for my boys.
It’s somewhat like “peanuts” that we put in with fragile objects into a shipping box, but it’s made of corn, and it sticks together when you put on a little water. It’s actually a great building game for children.
But the real fun started when we looked at the French side of the box. For those who don’t understand French, instead of writing “Hours of clean fun”, it actually says “Hours of fun spent cleaning”! Not only did they print a tag line that is the exact opposite of the original, but we should expect to spend hours of fun cleaning!
Duh!! Not exactly a winning sale’s argument with parents…
Anyway, we laughed ourselves to tears that afternoon. It was a memorable mother and daughter moment that I wanted to share with you 