There has been essentially no rain in Accra since our arrival. But, that all changed today.
A little after lunch, a front with very strong winds barreled through, bringing a six-hour power outage, our longest to date. The wind whipped up a lot of dust, darkening the sky. A welcome downpour led to standing water on our patio.
The dumsor made homework difficult. (Q: How do you research Mahatma Gandhi in the dark, without the internet? A: Tethering.) Thankfully, a previous director purchased a rechargeable bar-o-LEDs that assisted both studying and cooking. The electricity returned at 7:30 PM.
Before the storm, I tried to purchase another month of “unlimited” data online from Surfline. One word: ordeal.
The Surfline site kicked me to ExpressPay which applied two small transactions to my Capital One credit card (less than $3) and demanded that I report the amounts. Thereafter, the cost of the data was charged to my Captial One account. But, ExpressPay said the transaction failed.
At this point, my card had been charged (I could see it online), but I had no data.
Within seconds, I received an email from Capital One flagging all three transactions (the two small ones and the larger one for the data) as potentially fradulent. What to do? I made the reasonable decision to click the “Report a Problem” button and was promptly rewarded with a notice that my account had been cancelled and that a new card would arrive in the mail within seven business days. Hmmm. Not at all what I wanted.
So, I got on Skype and called the 800 number for Capitol One. It took several tries to explain the situation which, by now, involved four entities: Surfline, ExpressPay, Capital One, and me. I was escalated from a call center in (what sounded like) India to customer support in Richmond, Virginia. Capital One volunteered to call both Surfline and ExpressPay (international!). At one point I was calling Richmond on Skype. Richmond was calling ExpressPay in Accra. And, we were all connected on a 3-way conference call.
The second Capital One representative to whom I spoke sorted everything out, walking back from the threat to cancel our cards and saving our account! The reason for the trouble was ExpressPay’s strict fraud protection protocols. The two small charges were a way to verify identity, under the assumption that only you can log in to your credit card’s website. And a final identity verification step was supposed to be a phone call from ExpressPay to me. But, it never happened due to a problem on their end, not mine. Thus, the failed purchase. The Capital-One-hosted 3-way call with ExpressPay was sufficient to release the transaction. In a moment, but an hour and a half after I began, I had a month of data from Surfline.
Nothing is ever easy in Ghana.
—Matt
