A brief work anecdote I forgot to tell yesterday

On October 1, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

seriously-how-many-paint-chips-did-you-eat-as-a-child This one’s new.

We all have emails at our jobs, like I’m sure a lot of you do, and also like I suspect a lot of work email accounts, they’re really locked down in terms of what we can send and/or receive. Chief among these things: images, which is a serious pain in the ass because “send me a picture” is one of the first things you want to tell people when they call you and tell you something is damaged, and that means we have all had to create alternate work email addresses that can receive images.

Not the point. Point is I have a work email. It’s on my business cards. I hand out lots of business cards, as you can probably imagine.

I checked said work email late yesterday evening for the first time in a couple of days (Saturday is my Monday, for the record) and had two emails from PayPal. One of them was letting me know that I had money in my account, and the other was reminding me that I had money in my account.

My work email doesn’t have a PayPal account. Why the fuck would I have a PayPal account under my work email?

It turns out that a customer who had come in and gotten a quote on some side chairs had decided to pay for them by sending me the money via PayPal. Me, personally, at my work account. There’s a note attached to the payment: “4 blahblah side chairs.”

How the fuck is anyone stupid enough to think this is how anything works?

How the fuck do I get through a conversation with this idiot without using the word “idiot”? Because this person is an idiot and deserves to be called one.

Christ.

In which the internet breaks my head, and I need a lawyer

On December 4, 2014December 4, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing6 Comments

AvI_0yPCAAII5dD So, without getting into any details, because details would be terribly premature at the moment, I’m investigating another couple of avenues to use to sell my books, and my investigation of those avenues is leading me down a rabbit hole (yes, an avenue that leads down a rabbit hole, roll with it goddammit I’m tired) of all sorts of lawyerly nonsense and financial nonsense that I’m not used to having to think about. I’ve had to open a new PayPal account, for example, and I hate PayPal with a fiery, flaming passion; I’ve been trying to get these assholes to allow me access to some of my money that they have had since 2006, and they are insisting that I provide information about a bank account that has not existed since 2004 to get into it, and now they have another account from me under my current bank, only going through Luther’s email address.

(If that sentence confuses you, remember that Luther Siler is a pen name, and occasionally I will refer to him as if he’s a separate person.)

Anyway, point is, my name has to be on Luther’s PayPal account, which is also annoying because I don’t quite understand how PayPal works (because I haven’t used it often, because I hate it) and I don’t particularly want my real name splashed all over any transaction that I do using PayPal– which means that I need a PayPal business account, which is kinda okay since I was thinking of setting up a sole proprietorship publisher for my books anyway, and then I could just use the name of the company for all my PayPallish dealings and not my real name.

Only then I have to learn how to do that, and pay fees and visit county recorders and file paperwork and open a new bank account and– oh– file goddamned taxes, which terrifies me. Now, my dad is a CPA, so I assume he can help me with this shit, but I’m still generally not great about financial stuff and I don’t want to have to learn to get better so that three times a week someone can send me three bucks, y’know? And while I’m generally pretty fond of my dad and I know he would help me and this is literally what he does for a living, there’s also an aspect of Some Grown Ass Man Shit going on here and I prefer to figure things out myself rather than running to Daddy for help. Which is dumb.

Then again, getting my books into some of these pipelines I’m looking at would actually be pretty nice. And, let’s be honest here, my taxes in 2015 were going to be a nightmare anyway.

So what I need is a free lawyer, who knows her shit and is willing to just deal with all this stuff and then tell me that it’s free of charge because she thinks I’m awesome. I need my wife to become a lawyer, in other words, because ain’t nobody else gonna work that way.

Or maybe I just need to go play Dragon Age for a couple of hours and forget about all this nonsense for a while.

(Also, speaking of my books, I know I’ve been super-extra-harassy lately, but I’m one sale away from having sold books every day for a week, which would be really neat and has never happened before. If you happen to have been on the fence, today would be a great day to hop off of it.)