I'm working on archiving photos to Flickr (now a part of Yahoo). I've previously had a Flickr Pro account but I let it lapse since I haven't recently needed it. So, I needed to upgrade again to a Pro account.

On the fist screen in the upgrade process, two payment options were provided; PayPal or credit card. I'm not a fan of PayPal. I have an account and use it occasionally, but they've been involved in a number of incidents and, as a result, I don't normally use it when I don't have to. So, I selected payment by credit card and started to enter my information and when I was almost done, the screen refreshed all by itself causing me to lose everything I had entered. That's nice, I thought. So, I navigated back to the first screen and chose the PayPal option.

And, that's when I was reminded why PayPal Sucks. The first thing the PayPal screen says at the top of the page is "Add Credit Card (Recommended)." To anyone familiar with the English language "recommended" means "optional" as in, you don't have to do it. However, there is no way to get past this page without entering your credit card information. At the bottom of the page, there are two buttons, "Add Card" and "Cancel." Hardly consistent with the concept of a recommendation. Further, if I had wanted to enter my credit card information I might have, oh I don't know...selected payment by credit card?!?!

The yellow box on the same screen says: "To complete this secure payment, add a credit card to your PayPal account and click 'Continue.'" I already have credit card information associated with my PayPal account, so I started to think I somehow got hijacked by a phishing site, except the URL was a legit PayPal address. Above, where I'm supposed to put in my credit card information is says: "Number of cards active on your account: 1." So, what the heck! I have an "active" credit card on the account, so there should be no reason to enter any credit card information again.

I closed down my browser, restarted and went to my PayPal account. It turns out I had not updated my credit card information with PayPal since when it expired. Like I said, I don't use PayPal unless I have to. Accordingly, the credit card on my PayPal account was not active. I updated my account with the new expiration date and went back to the Flickr upgrade page, selected PayPal and I was no longer given the "Recommended" add credit card page.

What I want to know is, how can companies as large and sophisticated as PayPal and Yahoo screw up something so simple? Do they not know the definitions of "recommended" and "active." Do people at these companies use their own products? Arrrgh!

P.S., I sequentially number the names of all the pictures I put in posts. Prior to this post, I had used a total of 664 images since June of 2004. By sheer coincidence, the PayPal Add Credit Card (Recommended) screen's number is 666. Well, at least, that makes sense!