NP: Pele, Elephant

As part of the ongoing effort to get out of debt, I've been juggling a bit with some credit cards. Most recently, that's entailed consolidating some outstanding balances to one card. In a surprising but reassuring development, my bank called me after three of those very large balances moved, just to make sure everything was legit.

This, in and of itself, was cool, although an automated message giving a number to call could have been more helpful if it had clued me in that I'd actually need my credit card number on hand immediately, along with recent transaction information, but that may be nitpicking at this point.

As part of the review of recent transactions, I was alerted to a new charge from the good folks at Real for their Rhapsody service. This surprised me, because I logged on to their website and updated my billing information a month ago specifically so this wouldn't happen. I wanted the card to be "clean" for all the transfer activity.

So I call their customer support line, and get connected in a reasonable amount of time to somewhere in the Bangalore region. I've known for a while that a lot of tech support, particularly for technology firms, has been outsourced to India, but I think this is the first time I've had such an encounter. I'm a pretty open-minded guy, and I'm for free trade in general. But I could barely understand a word this guy said to me at times. Your brain gets used to certain cadences, and can get easily confused when someone's voice breaks that pattern. It's why I find New Zealanders to sometimes be incomprehensible, despite the fact that English is their first language.

Anyway, compressed to a phone's audio spectrum, it was that much worse, but I'm not really complaining about that. Ultimately, communication was made in both directions. I want to bitch about the stupidity of Real's billing system.

I'm a customer of both the Real Music Store and Real Rhapsody. I signed up for the Real store -- it was the only good option back when I was on Windows 98, and even now, iTunes won't burn CDs on my system -- a while back, using one credit card. When I signed up for Rhapsody, it defaulted to that same card. No problem there. When I realized I needed to move it, I logged in online, and made the change. Except, as I mentioned before, Rhapsody was still charging to the wrong card. When I explained this to our Indian friend, he informed me that I had only switched the Real store billing info, and not the Rhapsody info.

This is absurd for at least three reasons. First, they're the same fucking company. Second, I never explicitly gave them credit card info for Rhapsody. I just opted to use the one in my current Real profile. Finally, there was absolutely no part of the web interface that said they were different. There was only one place for billing information, and it had the updated info. At no point was there any indication that I had to deal with Rhapsody separatedly. My profile didn't even give me the option, despite the fact that it showed that I was both a Real store and a Rhapsody customer.

Now I'm going to have this tiny little ten dollar charge compounding interest at a higher rate while the low-interest transfers sit on top of it. It's not a huge deal, but I feel like my sound financial plan was thwarted because these guys are a bunch of idiots, and if there's one thing that annoys me, it's having things go wrong despite having taken care of pretty much everything.

And yes, I do feel better now having vented about it.