Robert Carey, aged eight
Part 2 of a short story series about the young Robert Carey - and in case you don't already have it, you can get part 1 as well, A Pest of a Boy.
OK. I\’ve researched it, I have a list of things to do culled from lots of different \”helpful\” videos on the WordPress tips-and-tricks site, I have a New Year\’s resolution about it and…
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All I wanted to do was put postage amounts on the Paypal payment page. So people could order one copy of The Poetry Diet and the postage would be added automatically to the total. If they wanted to order two copies of it, then the extra postage would be added automatically. Etc. Routine. Simple. In fact, Seeemples!
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Not.
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I carefully got to the correct page in my Paypal Business account, started entering the prices of the books – for one book £5.99 it still costs £2.00 for postage because the Royal Mail are madly trying to make a profit. I did this five times and hit save and…
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Blooey. My page had expired. Nothing had saved.
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Did all the calculations in advance. Went back through Paypal, tried again. Hit save.
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Blooey. I needed to put my password in again. Gone.
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Start again. Did it faster this time. Hit save.
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Blooey. Somewhere I\’d put three decimal places after the point. Gone again.
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Start again. Faster. Checked for bad naughty three decimal places twice. Hit save.
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Blooey. Something was wrong with the range values. I reread the error message four times, trying to work out what it meant. Thought I\’d got it. All gone.
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Start again. Faster. No bad naughty three decimal places. Each range carefully one pound bigger than the one before. Everything perfect. Postage amounts correct. Hit save.
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Blooey. Something still wrong with the range values. This is the error message:
\”The lower value in each range must be one unit greater than the higher value of the previous range, and each value must be greater than the previous value.\”
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I\’ve now read this twenty times and I still have no idea what\’s wrong. Is it that my amounts aren\’t right? Fr\’instance, is a unit a penny, ten pennies, a pound, a guinea? No idea. The postage doesn\’t go up enough? Or too little? Or what? No clue. Just blooey, all gone, nada, computer SAYS NO. Two hours of struggle, still I haven\’t got it right according to PayPal.
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And people like the Financial Hack wonder why I don\’t want to do this stuff? I haven\’t even got near actually trying to put the bloody PayPal button on my website yet and I\’m already stymied.
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I\’ve just emailed the little dears at Paypal. I don\’t expect much from them even if they do email me back so if anyone out there knows what I should be doing with the bloody range values (apart from something anatomically improbable) do please let me know IN NORMAL NON-COMPUTERESE ENGLISH.
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Thank you and good night.