Around 13 days back I chanced upon the Blue Frog music store and decided to purchase some albums. While attempting to check-out and pay by a Visa card the payment gateway (CC Avenue) threw an odd error of Error Code: 94 Error Description: Amount Invalid. Just for the heck of it I changed browsers (Chromium -> Google Chrome -> Firefox -> Opera on a stock Fedora 14 installation) and saw the same result.

I wrote in to the contact address, which is the sales@ address/alias.

I was advised to try a Mastercard as "Mastercard sometimes works better than Visa cards" (exact quote). Tried that. Same result. Tried, just for kicks, the same browser hoop - same result. And thereafter informed the contact about being unable to complete the transaction. All this continued for around a week or so by the time I had more or less decided to give up.

The point of this post is that how often do online retailers/shops lose customers because their payment gateways end up causing transaction grief ? And, how prepared are they to be able to provide alternative means of payment ? In this case I was offered the option of an electronic transfer to enable the transaction completion. However, an electronic transfer wouldn't provide me with a system generated receipt. Which is the natural end result of a check-out during a purchase.

So, how do the retailers deal with these situations ?

The problem with greed is that it is inevitably linked to downfall. Greed or, the sin of excess is one of the seven deadly sins. And it is probably the easiest to fall for.

Self control is an exhaustible resource. And, there are times during my training walk+runs that this is completely evident. The urge to just give up and return home is such a sweetly dangling temptation that one can actually probably feel the neurons acting in concert asking the muscles to work that way. So, the only way to counter the temptation is to invoke greed - a sinful need to do better. Over a small period of time my walk+runs have notched up from 1.5 km to 5 km. I consider a tremendous improvement especially because I can actually feel the difference. The problem is that I become greedy. In spite of a pretty much decently chalked out schedule, I decided that I'll push for half a kilometer more at the same pace. This morning.

Guess what ?

My legs are such a sheer mass of pain today that I'd rather go home, tuck in and let them be. Gordon Gekko was right - greed clarifies.