Mon, July 31, 2006
Identi-T Theft—3:11 PM
Last week, someone apparently hacked into my eBay account, initiated a bunch of fake auctions, and then made a bid on another fake auction from my account. By the time I was made aware of this, eBay had already canceled all the fraudulent auctions and sent me e-mail to tell me what had happened, and how to create a new password to protect my account, then get it reinstated. (They temporarily blocked me from selling/buying so the bad guys couldn't keep up their malfeasance.)
One of the steps in reinstating my account was to contact eBay via their security department's "Live Help" option, which is like a chatroom in your web browser to talk to someone who can reset your account. Kind of a pain in the ass, since you have to stay at the computer until someone becomes available for the chat. But the other inconvenience is: for some reason the chat window won't let you type a lowercase T. At first I thought it was something wrong with my laptop's keyboard, but I tried other applications – even other Safari windows – it was just eBay Live Help.
I was immediately reminded of David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day, in which he was forced to eschew "s" sounds to hide his persistent lisp from his speech teacher. He'd go around saying things like: "the left-hand and the right-hand glove of Janet have fallen to the floor," in order to avoid plurals and possessives.
I accepted Live Help's drawback as a similar challenge:
My login was compromised around a week ago. Then, I received e-mail saying ebay had fixed my login problem and removed some fake sales from my user name. I did as I was asked and made a new ebay password, however I remain as a bidder on #280010964567. Can I be removed, so my feedback numbers remain pure?
The funny thing is, as soon as Hurst logged in to the other side of the chat, he said "feel free to use all caps if the lowercase T isn't working." So, they know about this, but that's their solution? By then I'd already created this t-less masterpiece and I wasn't about to take the easy way out. I mean, really... all caps? Don't they know that on the web, there's no quicker way to look like a brain-dead goober than to start shouting in all caps? "DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHO SINGS THE THEME TO CSI NEW YORK? MY COUSIN NEEDS A PANCREAS." – see what I mean?
