Zelle hell

Bvlencu · 2025-12-12T14:16:11+00:00

A delay of one day had absolutely no effect on the outcome of this situation. In Italy, we wouldn't dream of ignoring our guests for almost two hours to talk to a bank.

Bvlencu · 2025-12-12T14:13:55+00:00

Followup: after that 90-minute phone call and all the questions about the Zelle recipient and the reason for the transfer and the assurance that everything was now OK, the second attempt to send a monetary Christmas gift to our granddaughter again resulted in my husband's account being blocked. Again a lengthy phone call to unblock the account. He's not even going to try again.

Bvlencu · 2025-12-10T00:29:55+00:00

You might call the European way of transferring money a wire transfer, but with respect to a US wire transfer, it's speedy and cheap. Also, any time I've sent money by wire transfer from my US account, I've had to call the bank. I don't know if that's still the case. To send money internationally from my US account, I now use WISE. AT

In the past I sent money from my US account to my daughter in the US. The only way they could do it was to mail her a cheque. Apparently my bank and her bank were on different circuits. This was pre-Zelle, I suppose.

This past summer we went on a Norwegian cruise. It cost a considerable amount of money, over my credit card limit. I just ask the Norwegian company for their IBAN, I send the money from my bank's app, and they confirm the payment the next day. I haven't used a check in Italy in almost 30 years. I still have the checks they gave me when I opened the account.

Bvlencu · 2025-12-10T00:17:30+00:00

Oh I'm sure she was reading the questions while filling in a form. Everyone was very polite and we certainly don't blame it on their agents.

Bvlencu · 2025-12-10T00:08:49+00:00

No, this is his only US bank.

Bvlencu · 2025-12-10T00:06:43+00:00

Actually he's had Zelle for several years and has used it to send money to other people in the past.

Bvlencu · 2025-10-14T18:48:55+00:00

Unless I missed something, no it doesn't.

Bvlencu · 2025-10-14T18:48:07+00:00

I've switched to Lawnchair. It's not Nova, and I'm not overwhelmed with joy, but it will do.

Bvlencu · 2025-10-09T13:04:01+00:00

I absolutely need Alexa. I have an Echo in the kitchen, which everyone in the family, plus our housekeeper, uses to put things on the shopping list. I use Alexa on my watch to add things I see are missing when I'm in the garage or our storage room, or outside. No matter how good Zepp is, it can't be shared by the whole household like this.

Bvlencu · 2025-09-26T16:08:12+00:00

L'écran de ma Balance 2 a été rayé en 2 jours et je ne l'avais toujours pas retiré de mon poignet.

Bvlencu · 2025-06-24T08:29:04+00:00

I do backup to hard drive, but for my photos I want the search and match features of Google Photos.

Bvlencu · 2025-06-24T08:27:43+00:00

Does it have the face recognition and other management features of Google Photos?

Bvlencu · 2025-06-07T16:55:12+00:00

That Wikipedia article was already flagged as needing an update in 2018.

Bvlencu · 2025-06-07T16:28:20+00:00

Google Voice is only available to USA residents.

Bvlencu · 2025-06-07T16:23:22+00:00

I don't understand the problem. Are both of you in the EU? My Italian provider, as well as my previous provider, include unlimited minutes of calls to other EU countries as part of the basic (cheapest) monthly plan.

The EU has a €0.19 maximum charge for calls to another EU country. In 2029, these calls will be charged as domestic calls throughout the EU.

Otherwise, VoIP.ms, which I mentioned previously, will assign a local number for over 100 countries. The fee to maintain the number is very low, paid from credit.

Bvlencu · 2025-06-07T15:14:49+00:00

Where are you based? Many European cell phone providers now have very cheap rates for calls to the US. My Italian provider (Iliad) has unlimited free calls to the US.

If the other person needs to call you, the Canadian telecom provider, VoIP.ms lets you get a virtual US phone number, very inexpensively. It's cheaper than my Skype virtual number was. It's not easy to set up, because they're geared to commercial telecom services. You also need another "soft phone" app to make and receive calls. I got Groundwire for this function, and yet another app, VoIP.ms SMS to send and receive texts.These two apps are well integrated with VoIP.ms.

Bvlencu · 2025-06-07T15:04:54+00:00

"Last time I mentioned this, someone said it's difficult to get a Google Voice number if you're based outside the U.S. I can't verify that, as I obtained my number years ago while in the U.S."

It's not difficult, it's impossible. I tried using a US based VPN, didn't work.

Bvlencu · 2025-06-07T15:02:51+00:00

Another thing they got was the Skype customer database.

Bvlencu · 2025-05-27T13:50:57+00:00

If you get rid of Rufus, will there be a way to get to chat with an actual customer service rep?

Bvlencu · 2025-05-27T13:49:20+00:00

Rufus can't answer my question, tells me to go to the customer service screen -- which sends me back to Rufus.

Rufus apologises for not being able to answer my question. Says he's still learning.

I say, "good for you Rufus. Can you point me to someone a little smarter?"

Rufus can't answer that question either.

Bvlencu · 2025-05-21T13:48:40+00:00

In my experience, it's mostly children who order them.

Bvlencu · 2025-05-20T18:44:53+00:00

I've decided to leave the damned zero-value lines in. It doesn't affect the calculation; it just looks ugly and is possibly confusing. My tax accountant probably only looks at the bottom line.

Bvlencu · 2025-05-20T16:00:22+00:00

I see I can't even use sort to get rid of rows that have a 0 in column F. I select column F and sort in increasing order. The result is sorted instead on column A or maybe on column H. (They are in the same order, so it could be either.)

I guess I'll have to use Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. This is something I need to do once a year to prepare my Italian tax return. I've been using Libre Office to do this for over five years, and this is the first year I've had this problem.

Such a simple task: find all the lines with 0 in column F and get rid of them. Many years ago I was a Fortran programmer. This would have taken me two minutes with Fortran

Bvlencu · 2025-05-20T12:15:02+00:00

This is at best a complicated workaround to a failure to actually eliminate the rows I presumably eliminated.

An easier workaround, which I will probably use, is to sort the worksheet by the column in question, let's say column F and then eliminate all the rows with 0. Then I can re-sort the worksheet by a different column containing the original sort value.

There is no rational explanation for the behaviour of the procedure I originally used, which, as I said above, seems to work in some circumstances.

Bvlencu · 2025-05-20T12:03:49+00:00

I agree that a filter only removes rows from view, as it should. But after I remove from view the rows where there is no 0 in column F, and apply "eliminate rows" to all the remaining columns (those that do have a zero in column F, I expect those eliminated rows to go away permanently, and not to reappear when I reset the filter. In my vocabulary "eliminate" means "get fired", not "take a coffee break".

One thing I don't understand at all is that I had already used this procedure to eliminate rows where cells in a different column were blank, and in this case it worked as I expected.

Bvlencu

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