So finally the robots at Yahoo! decided to give me the option that they should have given me on day#1, to send me to a real person. I got this email back to my last request to talk to a person. What was most impressive was that it was still from Gwen, who recieved my last email so maybe she isn't a robot.


Hello,
Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.
Please call us at: 408-349-5151 (option 5)

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,
Gwen
Yahoo! Customer Care
For assistance with all Yahoo! services please visit:
http://help.yahoo.com/

So I called the number listed on the email. The phone number passed me to an option tree even after I entered the option 5 and I entered 3 which specified "other". A woman answered the phone named Destiny.

"Hello this is Destiny"

I wanted to make sure that I got her name correct since Destiny is a bit of an odd name so I asked her to repeat it. She was asking why I was calling about Wallet and I informed her that I was having trouble paying Yahoo! and I just wanted them to take my credit card so that I could pay for LaunchCast Plus service and make the advertisements go away. She then asked if I could provide some personal information to verify that it was really me.

She needed to verify the following information:
What is the alternative email that you have on file?
What is your zip code?
What's your pet's name?

I figured that this might be my former puppy named Bijoux but apparently it wasn't correct. So she asked me the final confirming question "What is your birth date?". I knew that one so I was in! The she said:

"OK. We can now continue. At this moment I don't think I can help you. I need to transfer you to technical support person. It may take a few minutes before they appear. "

After about 45 seconds Destiny returns and informs me: "Apparently I can help you without connecting you to customer service. Is the information that you are entering the exact same information as your billing address?"

I then explained that this couldn't be the problem since I am entering the right information that works on lots of other sites. She put me on hold again and talked to the technical support people. Then she told me to close all of the browsers on my computer. Then she instructed me to go to my computer's control panel and to delete all of my cookies and all of my temporary Internet files. I did both but the temporary Internet files were taking more than five minutes to delete so we chatted a bit about how her father had this problem and it took fifteen minutes to delete the temporary files. I had a call coming in on the other line so I took her offer to leave the call and resolve it later.

After the call was done the hourglass had changed into a pointer again so I went to Yahoo! to enter my credit card. This time I went straight to Wallet since I didn't trust the Launch tools. On the first try it worked. I am now listening to Bob Dylan commercial free.

So I am sending the following email back to the Yahoo! folks.

"Destiny, Gwen, David, Caitlin, and Sydney

Thanks for your help. I spoke with Destiny today and she walked me through a process to delete my cache and it finally worked for me to add my credit card. I consider this case closed.

Have a great day.

- Dan Housman"