The $45 Pack of Smokes

Sorry I missed yesterday. Nothing much happened that I'm aware of, except that I ended up paying $45.00 for two packs of smokes and I'm still not sure how.

What happens is that a lot of the sponsors pay through PayPal. It generally takes a day or two for the payments to come through, then you have to withdraw them and send them to the bank, which takes 3-4 business days to go through. Now, all this is fine and good if you are good at math - which I'm not - so I went on and wrote a $4.10 check for a couple packs of smokes earlier in the week.

Technically, there's no way that check went through before the money from my PayPal account hit the bank. Even according to what the bank says; they apparently came through on the same day. But for no reason I can fathom, the bank passed the check before passing the PayPal deposit, meaning that I bounced the damned thing! Now they've charged me $20 and the place where I wrote the check is charging me $20, and I still have to pay the damned $4.10!!!

The bank and I are about to have it out, but I was so busy running around yesterday, trying to smooth things out with the cigarette place and figure out how the hell this all happened, that I simply didn't get a chance to post anything. My back is still to the wall with about three other checks, because - since they charged me the $20 NSF fee - my account is currently negative.

In other words, had the PayPal amount gone through before the check was cashed, everything would be hunky-dory. But since they passed the check first, I stand to bounce about 3 more!

You may be seeing a lot more ads in the coming weeks...