James Thigpen

I was really excited when starting my own small business to be using Skype for my telephony needs. It was really cheap, and I could get a real number and have it direct to my phone or to my computer depending on when I was logged in.

Too bad the support has sucked. My account password was stolen, and the culprit logged in and charged stuff to my stored credit card. Skype was happy to reset my password, but informed me that it was impossible to get a refund on these purely virtual unused goods.

At this point, I called my credit card company, and informed them of the fraud, and they took care of it. Skype didn’t like that very much however and completely disabled the paid functions of my account (which I had used my stored “skype credit” for).

So my business phone number went dark. They didn’t email me about this at all either. I don’t get a lot of traffic on that number so I didn’t even know it wasn’t working.

So that’s where I stand now. I’m on a live chat with a Skype rep trying to get it sorted out.

In the end, I suppose this is run by the same company that runs PayPal, and we all know how they are legendary for their uber-crappy support. I shouldn’t be that surprised.

Lesson of the Day: Don’t trust Skype (or PayPal). I can’t wait for Google Voice.

Update: Annnnd the chat just ended. Andre on the Skype Support Live Chat was way more awesome and helpful than the last person I spoke with @ Skype and actually helped me out. So there’s that.

Still, I’m not planning on using Skype for anything mission critical in the near future.

Just a reminder that I’ll be at the South Sound .NET User Group meeting on December 10th, 2009 to talk about MVP in a WinForms desktop application.

Everyone talks about all the fancy new WPF stuff, but I’m really excited to be talking about WinForms here. I know that a lot of us are stuck using WinForms for quite a while, and we’ll all be maintaining WinForms apps for the foreseeable future. MVP is something you can apply to your WinForms code and create desktop apps that are testable, flexible, and maintainable. We all want this.

I’m hoping to do a live coding example with a small ToDo application there building the app up and showing how to wire up all the MVP-ness. Visual Studio is currently being uncooperative and it’s currently doing a repair, so we’ll see if that fixes it. Here’s hoping! If not I’ll just do it in MonoDevelop or SharpDevelop. It’s all gravy.

Here are the details:
7-9PM
Olympia Center
222 Columbia NW
Olympia, WA 98501

See you there!