BostonWood bookshelves, phone call

I returned the fabric samples to Lawless. A. was “mid” on the fabric feeling, fine with the color. I don’t really care one way or the other. I certainly wasn’t going to attempt to find a fabric that felt and looked perfect from her perspective because that would have involved bringing her to Lawless and the lighting in those types of stores is incompatible with A. Or me, for that matter, which is why I am decisive to compensate.

I drove to BostonWood, and JC was kind enough to grant me an extra 20 minutes to complete that errand. I ordered C.’s bookcases, and asked if they could paint instead of stain and match a Benjamin Moore color. YES!!! So I ordered K’s bookcases, and it turns out they use a color-matched lacquer! So it’ll be really good, too. Woot!

I had a delightful phone call with JC and feel much better about how things went with the therapist yesterday.

It occurred to me A. has no place in the house to sit down and do her hair. I think that might be why she does her hair in the car? So I brought my mirror down and set it on the kitchen table so she’ll have that option and we’ll see how it goes.

R. took the TV down from A.’s room! I need to get it turned on and tuned into something to show that the screen works and list it on FBM. R. saved the stand and it also has a universal mount attached to it which we are including so it should move quick once listed.

We were planning a trip to Patio Barn tomorrow morning, for a last effort to do aluminum and teak instead of poly for deck lounge furniture, however, A. dropped a flosser in the toilet recently and I told her she could flush it and that may have been a mistake. The toilet is wobbly anyway, so I called Papalia and they are coming out tomorrow. Maybe we’ll get really lucky and they’ll show up at 8 and we can still go to Patio Barn after.

Payments, because I’ve really been making a lot of them lately

I had a ton of fun in dealer rooms at RavenCon and at BaltiCon. Several dealers told me their Square or whatever device “didn’t do phones”, but of course they all did. And they were all surprised that they worked. And then one of them failed to notice a payment hadn’t completed immediately, but I was chatting with the neighboring stall and we redid it no problem. I also hadn’t bothered to check for the ack text that time, but I went back and checked all my previous purchases; it really was just that one.

Recently, when I was chatting with someone while buying furniture (hopefully this is anonymous enough because I’ve been buying so much fucking furniture), I was told they switched processors when their processor would only allow NFC payments (card or phone) up to $500. I will note: this is a _furniture_ store. The processor’s explanation was that NFC payments were less secure than physical cards (presumably with the chip, because if they meant swipe, boy, this is a much stupider story than I had thought). We agreed that this was foolishness, but then I got to thinking about it.

Isn’t a phone NFC payment — Apple Pay or whatever — _MORE_ secure than the same payment on the same card using NFC? I means, if I lost my card, someone could use the card. But the phone is gonna be harder. Obviously, for _me_ the phone is more secure because tokenization.

But the whole thing really made me realize just how befuddled we have all become about the many types of payment available and how they work and how to tell that they did work — or didn’t work.

Good news, tho — at the furniture stores, it is belt and suspenders all the way. They get my address, phone number, physical address, they make sure that the transaction completes, I get an ack SMS and another from the card’s app, and there is usually an emailed receipt and I also get a printed receipt. We know sooooo much about each other.

It does feel a little weird tho that so many people doing in person transactions on the business side appear to have a really shaky understanding of how these things work. On the other hand, stories of cashiers not knowing how to handle cash transactions where someone handed over coins to try to make things come out even are Legend.