One of the things that happens with simple plans is a few simple things can make them rather complicated.

My plan today was to open a Japanese PayPal account so that people could transfer funds from an overseas account to my new Japanese account. Setting up the new account was no problem and only took a few minutes. Then, as an experiment, I tried to send money from my US account to my new Japanese account.

Nothing ensued except a series of  “I’m sorry, Dwayne, I’m afraid I can’t do that” messages. Those were followed by some web searches and a lot of swearing.

Eventually I figured out what I had to do, which wasn’t that complicated: change the account, prove I am who I am and that I live where I live and do this all with photos of documents wait five-seven days to get a pin code and then enter the pin code and then everything will work. (Well, maybe it was more complicated than I thought; suddenly BitCoin seems like a good idea.)

I did all the required changes and sent it off to the Mysterious Forces of PayPal (actual job titles) who contacted me with further steps to take that involved the odd notion of entering the information in my Japanese PayPal account in Japanese. (What evil is this?)

That seemed simple, except the system wouldn’t allow me, even after I changed languages, to enter the entire address in Japanese. This prompted a message from me.

Oddly, at this point, I received a positive message that said I didn’t have to worry about that one bit of English. The same message said the friendly stranger had also made another change (putting my full name as it was on my submitted documents) which made my life easier.

It all ended so well that I’m now convinced a disaster of some sort is about to occur.