Show HN: PayPal emailed me today about 2001 request

zxcvbn4038 · on Aug 28, 2020

After I left high school I signed up with a temp agency, filled out all the paperwork, never heard anything. Twelve years later, I received a phone call. I explained I had been employed full time for over a decade. They said that if I refused the assignment I might not be eligible for future opportunities. I told them I was ok with that. ;)

Along the same vein, a few years ago I had an employer that wanted proof I graduated high school. Blink. "You realize that I graduated almost forty years ago?" Didn't matter. Believe it or not I actually found the school system and they were able to produce a copy. I'm sure they had to climb over Jimmy Hoffa's cryotube and the Ark of the Covenant to get to it.

lolpython · on Aug 28, 2020

My father had the same experience recently, with needing to prove he went to high school. He has an undergraduate degree and a graduate degree in creative writing, but he needed to have his old high school print out his diploma. In order for him to get a medical caretaker job.

knolax · on Aug 28, 2020

Was this an automated system he was dealing with? I can't imagine the type of person who would with a straight face demand a high school diploma after seeing a graduate degree.

perl4ever · on Aug 28, 2020

Well, if you don't have any advanced degree, it's still pretty obnoxious to insist on documentation a few decades on, when maybe the high school or school district doesn't even exist any more. More painful and humiliating when a high school diploma is all you've got and you've been working for like 30+ years. I know a hospital that did this and remember an applicant loudly complaining.

lolpython · on Aug 30, 2020

A human insisted to his face that he provide a high school degree. As part of the hiring process. It must have been a hard requirement. Yeah, pretty strange. My Dad eventually got a copy of his diploma from the 70s and got the job.

aiyodev · on Aug 28, 2020

There’s a software company in Seattle that won’t let you fill out their online application without entering your high school GPA. I suspect they do this to discriminate against older applicants.

zxcvbn4038 · on Aug 29, 2020

Another likely explanation is the online application was done by an intern fresh out of college and GPA is the only metric they had ever known. Like not being able to enter a birth date before 1970 (time_t), or not allowing more then one John Smith to register an account.

otterlicious · on Aug 28, 2020

Peek-A-Boo 4-U cancelled the following...

There is a pending payment requests section in PayPal. The buyer finally noticed it and cancelled it.

You would think they would expire these after some time. Imagine if the buyer completed the payment 19 years later??

JaceLightning · on Aug 28, 2020

This seems like spam and not a real request. The amounts don't even add up to the total.

nitro_luke · on Aug 28, 2020

I wouldn't trust the numbers paypal provides as far as i could throw them. My wife had to stop using PayPal for a whole host of reasons, namely could not figure how much money she made because the information displayed on the webpage was inaccurate and the reports were too confusing.

paulkrush · on Aug 28, 2020

Oh it's real, I've gotten 3 of them in the past year. I sold 1000's of items back then. At this point I think it's kind of cool. I wish you could view your eBay history back to the beginning. You can go way back on Amazon.

mcraiha · on Aug 28, 2020

That beats Duke Nukem Forever pre-orders receipts.

the_resistence · on Aug 30, 2020

20 years ago I used to work for a private investment fund which had an arrangement with a foreign custodian bank. Although the fund closed 2 years later, I still get monthly statements with zero balance even after we begged them to stop sending.

csunbird · on Aug 28, 2020

Would you mind removing any kind of personal information?

quickthrower2 · on Aug 29, 2020

Now how do you get your tax back from the IRS?