the boat sucks...

   Everyone has been in the same boat as I am, at least once in their lives. If someone tells you otherwise, they're lying. For some of us though, there never seems to be a shore line in sight, no chance to to stop fighting the current and choose the direction you want to go. I'm not up shit creek without a paddle. Not by a long shot, but, DAMN! My arms are getting tired of rowing.

   We've cut back all of our services; phone, cable, internet, cell. Yet that still doesn't seem to be enough. There always seems to be that one extra thing that needs to be dealt with YESTERDAY! UGH!! So to "help" out more sacrifice needs to be made. When you feel desperate sometimes you can make things worse.  That almost happened this past week.

   We've put a few odds and ends up for sale on Kijiji and Craigslist. Nothing super important, just some items we have that we don't need or use, such as my paintball clothes. Earlier this week we got a response through Craigslist. At first I was pleased but the buyer wasn't local. Panama City, Florida isn't even close to home. But what the hell, right? Ship the stuff and pay the bills. Once the guy said he wanted to pay via PayPal things started to feel wrong.

   I didn't have PayPal, but I set one up and sent the guy the info he needed. Shortly after that I got an email from "PayPal" stating that the money was waiting. Cool! No, it wasn't.

   The message stated that the funds were being held until I sent PayPal a copy of the tracking number. This is to prevent fraud, apparently, and the information had to go to paymentagentfour at consultant.com. Now something is screaming at me, "It's a scam!!" but I had to be sure that it wasn't just first time jitters.

  I couldn't find anything in my account to show there was a pending payment. Checking the PayPal help page didn't turn up anything for this sort of thing, neither did Google. More Googling, checking web forums and such turned up that consultant.com isn't used by PayPal. I found other things that might indicate a scam, such as how the email addressed me. Now the red flags are waving big time. The final nail in the coffin was when I tried to respond to payment agent four and the email was bounced back.

   This doesn't mean I won't use PayPal. It just means I know I need to be extra careful. Now that I've gone back over the emails sent to me I've spotted some spelling and grammar issues. I don't expect anyone to be perfect, but for a major company to have the number of errors I found, not only should it raise a flag, but someone should be fired if it's for real.