This is a pretty old story by this point, but I'd just like to reiterate that Paypal is terrible.

Really, just terrible.

Back in the day, I had a Paypal account just like everyone else. I wanted to buy some item on eBay that only accepted Paypal as an option, so I tried to register. Lots of timeouts, server errors, and so on. Not exactly raising my confidence in your service.

Finally get my account validated, head over to eBay, click the 'Paypal' button to send funds, and bam… yet another server error. I'm pretty sure it was a 404.

At that point, I was pissed. How did they expect to run a business moving my money around when they can't even generated a working URL? So I close my account, which was a whole other ordeal.

Fast forward a few years, and now I need Paypal again. For a client's project I'm working on, I need to buy a membership to Greensock (great site for anyone with more than a passing professional interest in Flash), so I'm faced with the inevitability of re-registering.

So I go through the registration process -- credit card required -- and start the credit card validation process, which they say takes four days.

That's odd right off the bat. So I can make an instantaneous purchase with my credit card pretty much anywhere else, but once I use Paypal's "facilitating" service, I need to wait four days for them to prove my credit card is real, despite allowing me to open an account with it.

Okay, well… my client's waiting on me, but I can probably push the project a few days.

Tap tap. Click.

Four days pass, and their secret $1.95 charge shows up on my credit card account, with a four-digit numerical code that I am to enter into their website.

I wonder what the odds are I could have written a macro to continuously try four-digit numerical codes at random, and probably have validated by credit card before their four days were up. Judging from the rest of their service, probably pretty good.

After a couple more server errors that are almost criminally stupid -- on the level of: clicking through to their credit card validation page from 'my account' leads to an error page, but going to the credit card validation page from a transaction goes to a working page -- I get my credit card validated. Hallelujah.

I click 'purchase' one more time, and log back in to Paypal, expecting everything to be just hunky dory. I can finally get some more work done on this project, and maybe I'll actually get paid this month.

Oh, that red text doesn't look good.

Paypal says I can't use my credit card for this transaction. No further explanation. End game. Fuck you. Was there no thought process over there that went, hey, maybe this would have been nice to know FOUR DAYS AGO, when you made me validate my credit card?

But no. The only response Paypal has is to forward me to the bank account linking page, which makes my personal checking account Paypal's bitch.

Right, like I want to give your service, which has thoroughly demonstrated its level of professionalism up until now, a direct line into my checking account.

There's no mention about how long that would take, but it's moot anyway. I don't have my checkbook with me, so I can't pull the routing and account numbers off of the checks for the confirmation.

This is supposed to be easy?

This is supposed to be good service?

Paypal takes 3-5 percent of every transaction, plus additional fees that are pretty much in line with other major financial institutions.

The difference is, they can't even get the basics right. They are a purported e-commerce facilitation service, with a nonfunctioning website, that utterly fails to facilitate transactions.

Why do we need another mentally and ethically regressed troll squatting under the bridge between every financial transaction? Don't we have enough of them, reaching up with their twisted claws to scrape off real value and shovel it into their wet gaping maws, while providing no value themselves?

This is, sadly, the way in which people make their money now, I guess. It's both easier and more profitable to be a middleman who does nothing (hello insurance companies, banks, most news outlets, and financial brokers) than to actually do something useful.

So my question is… why do we let them?