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Trail Permit Purchase Screwup


revrnd

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I was billed 5 times for 2 permits....  What a nightmare.....

 

So I have an extra $1580 worth of debt on my credit card.  Like I needed any extra help spending at this time of year.

 

 

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On 02/11/2017 at 9:59 AM, sledjunk said:

Self portrait???? :lmao:

Have you been told lately??   I'm going to sick STG on you!

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42 minutes ago, Domino said:

I was billed 5 times for 2 permits....  What a nightmare.....

 

So I have an extra $1580 worth of debt on my credit card.  Like I needed any extra help spending at this time of year.

 

 

Hey if  its a point card hopefully you get to keep all the extra points:D

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1 hour ago, Domino said:

Have you been told lately??   I'm going to sick STG on you!

Blame it on your wife and ask what she has been buying... do you get cash back rewards. If you get to keep them it may not be a bad thing.

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Any of our computer techies venture to speculate what caused the problem?

 

Hopefully the OFSC has a clause in the Service Provider’s Agreement that compensates the OFSC for all of their additional labour and other costs to correct this major snafu.

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26 minutes ago, bbakernbay said:

Any of our computer techies venture to speculate what caused the problem?

 

Hopefully the OFSC has a clause in the Service Provider’s Agreement that compensates the OFSC for all of their additional labour and other costs to correct this major snafu.

Perhaps a corrupted data base. I suspect and would hope that the service provider would have had multiple servers in use to process the trail permits with load balancing of incoming traffic between the multiple servers with each request being directed to the least busy server. There is mirroring or replication between the data bases on the servers. If the load balancing failed it could over load a specific server(s) or if the mirroring got out of synch the data bases could have been considered corrupted with incorrect information. One server thinks you have a permit the other doesn't. Just a couple of the numerous possibilities. I don't think it was a network connectivity problem as they wanted to do a limited test to see if the problem was resolved which suggests data processing or corruption problems. If it was processing capacity or network capacity they would have wanted to load up the processing to do a stress test and see if the system would handle the volume rather than the limited load test. Then it could be a source code problem (a glitch in the program itself) Sometimes a misplaced character in the source code of a program can cause intermittent strange things to happen. For example it could be something such as someone putting in an invalid character such as a symbol instead of an alpha numeric cause a system to hang or crash.

 

So many variables. I remember having a needle in a haystack problem with Point Of Sale software (cash register) years ago. You would buy two shirts the receipt would show two but only charge for one. Trying to recreate the problem was a nightmare. You need to find it in order to fix it. Car mechanics can relate to this... problem never happens when the mechanic has it. For our problem if you went to the register with two shirts they got to the subtotal step and you said hold on let me get a third, the salesperson toggled back to add the third shirt then you said on second thought I don't want the third shirt I only want two. Voiding the third shirt voided it from the receipt. The receipt however now showed the price of the first shirt, the price of the second but in fact voided the price of the second shirt from the total price. This was the only sequence that would cause the problem. I suspect unless someone has a solid IN to the OFSC we will never know really what went wrong.

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34 minutes ago, 02Sled said:

Perhaps a corrupted data base. I suspect and would hope that the service provider would have had multiple servers in use to process the trail permits with load balancing of incoming traffic between the multiple servers with each request being directed to the least busy server. There is mirroring or replication between the data bases on the servers. If the load balancing failed it could over load a specific server(s) or if the mirroring got out of synch the data bases could have been considered corrupted with incorrect information. One server thinks you have a permit the other doesn't. Just a couple of the numerous possibilities. I don't think it was a network connectivity problem as they wanted to do a limited test to see if the problem was resolved which suggests data processing or corruption problems. If it was processing capacity or network capacity they would have wanted to load up the processing to do a stress test and see if the system would handle the volume rather than the limited load test. Then it could be a source code problem (a glitch in the program itself) Sometimes a misplaced character in the source code of a program can cause intermittent strange things to happen. For example it could be something such as someone putting in an invalid character such as a symbol instead of an alpha numeric cause a system to hang or crash.

 

So many variables. I remember having a needle in a haystack problem with Point Of Sale software (cash register) years ago. You would buy two shirts the receipt would show two but only charge for one. Trying to recreate the problem was a nightmare. You need to find it in order to fix it. Car mechanics can relate to this... problem never happens when the mechanic has it. For our problem if you went to the register with two shirts they got to the subtotal step and you said hold on let me get a third, the salesperson toggled back to add the third shirt then you said on second thought I don't want the third shirt I only want two. Voiding the third shirt voided it from the receipt. The receipt however now showed the price of the first shirt, the price of the second but in fact voided the price of the second shirt from the total price. This was the only sequence that would cause the problem. I suspect unless someone has a solid IN to the OFSC we will never know really what went wrong.

Thank you for your excellent response as to what might have caused the problems.

 

Any thoughts on whether OFSC will recover their (our) out-of-pocket costs?

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8 minutes ago, bbakernbay said:

Thank you for your excellent response as to what might have caused the problems.

 

Any thoughts on whether OFSC will recover their (our) out-of-pocket costs?

Depends on what their Service Level Agreement is. I always had a SLA with all of my customers that we provided managed services for. The contract spelled out availability guarantees, escalation procedures at specific time intervals and the consequences for outages and compensation. The norm for many years has always been five nines of availability 99.999% uptime as the target. Some are now saying they want six nines. When you talk to business people they say 99.999% wow that's great and are real happy.  The thing is when you work out 99.999% of a year that means that having a downtime of just over 5 minutes a year is fine. When you tell the customer that they aren't so happy anymore. 5 minutes of lost productivity to a large corporate customer is a huge loss. Some measure downtime losses in 10's or 100's of thousands per minute depending on the scope of the outage.  That's also why a good data centre has redundancy built into everything. Depending on whose fault the outage was and the SLA agreement there could well be a recovery of expenses and a penalty paid.

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21 hours ago, gobills said:

Hey if  its a point card hopefully you get to keep all the extra points:D

It's a cashback card ($1.75%) and I wondered why my Rogers bill was redeemed in full.  So I had to look and thats when I found my extra spending.  So I'm sure I'll lose the cash back on the refund.  Hell, I think I'm going to owe them by the time I'm done.

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I had a similar problem many years ago that ended up quite embarrassing. We had just bought somewhere around $4K+ in appliances. When you use a credit card the first thing that happens is that the purchase updates your "open to buy". The charge shows as pending with your bank until the merchant sends a "settlement" file to the credit card holder and they actually process the transaction fully. The purpose of updating the open to buy is so you don't go to multiple places in a short window and exceed your credit limit.

 

The first time the retailer swiped my credit card for the appliances it came back transaction failed which can be interpreted as timing out. The split second time out happened just after my open to buy had been updated. They swiped the card again and the open to buy was updated again by $4K+ meaning my total open to buy had just been diminished by about $9K on top of a bunch of already small purchases on the card like gas and such.

 

We went to dinner with a bunch of friends that night and we were picking up the tab. When the bill arrived the card was declined. I should have had about $4K still available on the card. The double update to the open to buy had eaten up my available credit and even though it's standard practice to automatically approve 10% above your limit it still had come back declined. Fortunately between my wife and I we had enough cash to pay the about $350 dinner tab.

 

I watch my bank and credit accounts closely as well as my credit rating especially in todays world of identity theft.

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Has anyone seen a refund yet?  I'm growing very tired of waiting and I will soon have to pay my Credit Card company for $1580 worth of fraudulent charges.   I expect a time, not a stupid dam statement like  "will take some time".    How much time will you hold my funds without being more specific on the resolution??  

 

Lesson learned, don't give the OFSC your credit card info.  Let's go back to paper and cash!

 

I received this statement of crap from the OFSC:

 

421fa88d-f408-4d53-8e45-94f80118565a.jpg

Due to the high volume of permit transactions during the end of October while the system was experiencing technical difficulties, it will take some time for us to sort through legitimate transactions versus duplicate charges. We’d like to assure you that the staff team are working through the duplicate transactions as quickly as possible.

 

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Domino said:

Has anyone seen a refund yet?  I'm growing very tired of waiting and I will soon have to pay my Credit Card company for $1580 worth of fraudulent charges.   I expect a time, not a stupid dam statement like  "will take some time".    How much time will you hold my funds without being more specific on the resolution??  

 

Lesson learned, don't give the OFSC your credit card info.  Let's go back to paper and cash!

 

I received this statement of crap from the OFSC:

 

421fa88d-f408-4d53-8e45-94f80118565a.jpg

Due to the high volume of permit transactions during the end of October while the system was experiencing technical difficulties, it will take some time for us to sort through legitimate transactions versus duplicate charges. We’d like to assure you that the staff team are working through the duplicate transactions as quickly as possible.

 

 

 

 

Call the credit card company and have them reverse the charges

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Yes, I got my refund yesterday.  I was notified with a nice email from Lisa at the OFSC office and I checked my credit card to verify the transaction.  The whole deal stinks, but it seems like they are trying to make good on it. 

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On ‎11‎/‎10‎/‎2017 at 2:19 PM, 02Sled said:

Call the credit card company and have them reverse the charges

I to was charged 2 times on my Credit card. I sent them a message ( before they shut this Contact form down) telling them this. I got a speedy reply that I would be getting both my permit and a refund. 3 days later the credit showed up and a week later had my Permit. Very decent Ladies whom I dealt with. 

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54 minutes ago, pete/ny said:

I to was charged 2 times on my Credit card. I sent them a message ( before they shut this Contact form down) telling them this. I got a speedy reply that I would be getting both my permit and a refund. 3 days later the credit showed up and a week later had my Permit. Very decent Ladies whom I dealt with. 

I have no doubt they are working diligently to go through all the transactions looking for duplicates and reversing them. Having been charged twice and waiting for a refund for one of the charges at $197.50 may not be too bad depending on your statement date and when you need to pay the balance to avoid interest charges. If however you are overcharged, I believe he said about $1500 and the due date is fast approaching you may not want to be too patient and have to shell out the $1500. Then when you get the credit deal with trying to get a refund into your bank account or waiting until you spend enough to offset your negative balance on the credit card.

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My friend let me know he got his permit in the mail. All is good.

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On 10/11/2017 at 2:19 PM, 02Sled said:

Call the credit card company and have them reverse the charges

I am now pissed.  Over two weeks and not a friggin word (Directly) from the OFSC.

 

I have sent them another email and told them I am filing a claim with my CC company if they have not confirmed the refund by the end of the day.

 

My patience is done.  This is their issue, their problem that they have made my issue and my problem.

 

 

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32 minutes ago, Domino said:

I am now pissed.  Over two weeks and not a friggin word (Directly) from the OFSC.

 

I have sent them another email and told them I am filing a claim with my CC company if they have not confirmed the refund by the end of the day.

 

My patience is done.  This is their issue, their problem that they have made my issue and my problem.

 

 

Frustration has been eased as a direct response has now been received and a resolution is expected by end of day.

 

This really sucks for the OFSC Staff and all the Permit Buyers affected.  Somebody needs to be held accountable!

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2 hours ago, Domino said:

Frustration has been eased as a direct response has now been received and a resolution is expected by end of day.

 

This really sucks for the OFSC Staff and all the Permit Buyers affected.  Somebody needs to be held accountable!

proof positive that ofsc watches this forum

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2 hours ago, Domino said:

Frustration has been eased as a direct response has now been received and a resolution is expected by end of day.

 

This really sucks for the OFSC Staff and all the Permit Buyers affected.  Somebody needs to be held accountable!

The OFSC should find a new service provider as it is obvious their current provider is incompetent. 

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On the flip side, buddy of mine says he was also double charged but in the OFSC's defense, he kept trying after it was posted clear as day asking peeps not to try and purchase (admits he saw the message but went ahead n tried anyways). That end of things has to be uber frustrating for them.

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19 hours ago, ZR SLEDHEAD said:

On the flip side, buddy of mine says he was also double charged but in the OFSC's defense, he kept trying after it was posted clear as day asking peeps not to try and purchase (admits he saw the message but went ahead n tried anyways). That end of things has to be uber frustrating for them.

In my case it was before they admitted to having an issue.  I thought it was just busy and kicking me out.  Never thought it was at that stage to bill me.  I also did not receive multiple purchase confirmations, just one.

 

The vendor in charge of this platform should be paying up for damages and costs to the OFSC.

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On ‎14‎/‎11‎/‎2017 at 9:28 AM, Domino said:

I am now pissed.  Over two weeks and not a friggin word (Directly) from the OFSC.

 

I have sent them another email and told them I am filing a claim with my CC company if they have not confirmed the refund by the end of the day.

 

My patience is done.  This is their issue, their problem that they have made my issue and my problem.

 

 

When did you order your permits?

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