Lots of buzz the last 24 hours about the new PayPal portable features. I’ll get to that in a minute but first a story about one of the very first things online we had to deal with when we returned from Arizona recently.

My wife said our PayPal password no longer worked. She had tried numerous times and it wouldn’t work and trying to reset it didn’t work either. So I got involved and tried the same series of steps. Finally, she ended up calling the help line to find out how to fix. She was instructed to reset the password the way we’d already done it. This time it let us set a new password. There was never any explanation about why this didn’t allow us to reset the password from the site or why the password didn’t work any longer except the rather feeble: “sometimes these things just happen” (I’m paraphrashing what we were told).

Since March 8, 2002 we’ve been accepting PayPal for some of the programming-related work we do. This was after many, many requests to start accepting these type payments. Initially we were concerned about the security and that people — or the vendors using the service — would get hosed.

Turns out that we’ve had a pretty good run with the service and in all this time, more than 4 years now this is the only login problems we’ve had. For a minute I was thinking about all those phishing messages we’ve received telling us if we didn’t do something our account had been disabled. For a moment, however brief it was, I thought we had trashed a legitimate message that had finally gotten our account disabled for real. Those bastard phishers, look how they’ve corrupted our minds?

But just some kind of weird system glitch, it seems.

Now fast forward to over the last day the news being that now folks will be able to send money over their cellphone using Paypal, text messaging and a secret pin number (see photo above). We have Verizon phones so I was curious if this would work with our phones or if we needed special phones or services. Looks like we won’t need anything special, we can text message or call and use the pin.

I noticed when checking out the account that we had a foreign phone number attached to our account (not activated) that was not one of our numbers. This had a local area code. We went into the account area and removed the phone number. We don’t know how that number got there but this brings back some of those concerns we had 4+ years ago.

If we need to send money we can send it from the office desktop computer. I don’t really see the need to do it from the field, but I suppose there are some circumstances it could come in handy. Think we’ll just wait and see when/if the need arises before we actually activate any numbers and use it.

Anybody else planning on sending money this way?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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