Wednesday, 20 July 2011

Peter gets a statement to pay for his credit card. Can you pay this for me? Yeah no problem, I took care of the bills in the UK mainly cos I was passing the banks most days and worked in the centre of Worcester. So my role continues here in South Africa especially as I'm not working.
But the problem is because I don't have a job I can't have anything in my own name, but even so how hard is it to pay a credit card bill? Well it goes like this.

Who's the credit card with? Our med aid company *digs out med aid info* sets up online service.

1st problem the med aid company information assumes I've used med aid before.

So I go to our bank. We need to set them up as a beneficiary, ok I can do that. Beneficary is similar to a direct debit but it doesn't automatically take a payment monthly you have to action it.

So I sign in, go to beneficiaries. It asks for a branch and account number. I don't have one. Email med aid company for info, no response. How am I supposed to know the med aid and the credit card departments are separate companies. Silly girl I assumed they'd either a) tell me this or b) pass the email on.

So back to online banking to set up credit card payment. It sends Reference number to the mobile phone, need to call Peter to ask him for the number as it's his phone it's sent to. This is a security measure.
Next they want to know beneficiary bank. How the fuck am I supposed to know that? Oh hang on I remember now, when I changed email address so I get notification of payment due it told me details with the bank (which it named) would not be altered. So I put their name in which then took me to the next step for credit card number, another phone call to Peter, right now to make payment, request proof of payment and wait for Peter to call to say he'd received SMS confirmation payment had been made.

Now going to have to wait to see if we've just paid ourselves or actually paid the bank.

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