Seems I’ve ticked off some very nice people.

Our T-Shirts are conversation pieces. They generate a lot of questions about what we do, and they have become a steady stream of income for us. But lately, people have been ordering T-Shirts and they haven’t received them.

We lost our T-Shirt volunteer a while back (she did a great job, but with a toddler around, the work became overwhelming) and it’s been over a year since I had to process T-Shirts. I honestly didn’t know what I was doing since our volunteer handled all of this.

So I went in search of another volunteer, and several people offered to help. I chose Ralph, who not only had a home office but had a wife and daughter who were willing to help balance the workload.

Right at the time I was transferring the responsibility to Ralph, I started traveling pretty extensively (visited home for a while, bounced to Jordan for a bit of work, etc) and the transfer wasn’t as clean as it could have been. I didn’t send him the shirts very quickly, and the orders kept coming in (and backing up).

Then, we ran into our most recent problem with PayPal. I wanted to create a new account so the volunteer could have their own account for T-Shirt income, shipping, etc as opposed to the old method whereby the volunteer had access to the entire HFC account. The problem is that the PayPal account must be verified.

This happens one of two ways. We can either link it to a bank account or we can set up a PayPal Credit card. I don’t want a credit card because it would have to be in my name, and I’m unemployed and don’t need any more credit hassles. That leaves us with the bank account option. The problem is that the HFC bank account is already linked to the HFC PayPal account. So I’m out of bank accounts.

We can’t “accept” money in PayPal until we verify the account.

So anyhow, I’m sorry for the delays and the mixup. It looks absolutely awful when someone pays money to a .org run by hackers and then the goods don’t arrive. But please know that despite the problems, we are now shipping shirts, and working on getting the PayPal thing straightened out. From a higher perspective, I’m sorry for how this must have looked. Customers were getting zero response (thanks to my perpetual mountain of email, and my inability to keep up with it all) and that made things worse. Personally, I pride myself in stretching every single donated dollar to the max. We have almost ZERO overhead, meaning that nearly all of the donated money goes right into our programs.

Know that I appreciate your continued support and understanding. I, for one, have a LOT to learn about running a program this big. HFC is certainly bigger than I can handle, and thankfully that’s more often a blessing than a curse.

Johnny