Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s Mercury in retrograde. Maybe it’s just happenstance.

Whatever the reason, I have been immersed in malfunctioning technology for almost three straight weeks. One instance imparted this life-long lesson: Never try to transfer registrars when your domain is even close to expiring.

The other was not as simple. It started a few months ago, actually, when our credit card terminal stopped talking to computer on the other end of the line, with no ready explanation. A few solid hours (read: DAYS) of tech support later, the problem was diagnosed, tentatively, as a phone line problem.

We had never had a problem at our old space, when we had an everyday phone line from Verizon. But when we moved, I took the opportunity to simultaneously free ourselves of their crushingly bad customer service and indulge my inner tech geek by swapping to the internet-based Vonage.

Despite all the talk, I trust the internet to provide pretty great solutions. And even if the quality wasn’t great, it couldn’t be any worse than my cell phone while driving through Signal Hill (um, it is). And I certainly never thought about digital signals interfering with analog ones (they do!) and that it might effectively paralyze my equipment (it did).

I tried to set up Charter’s phone service instead (not all mega-conglomerates are created equal!), but come to find, I can’t port my phone number if I switch to Charter (something about a Los Alamitos switch), I’d either have to ditch the number (not gonna happen!) or pay for two separate phone services (also not gonna happen!). So much for that whole keep your telephone number thing! It turns out, that FCC act only applies, easily, to wireless numbers.

With the temptation of Verizon looming, I considered my choices. Not accepting credit cards is an impossibility these days. So I had two choices: buy a terminal that worked with a digital line or process credit cards over the internet.

Since my conversion to internet-based technology was the reason I was in this situation in the first place, I wasn’t too keen on using it again, but I was even less keen on the new terminal’s price tag. Thus I began Googling (as opposed to, y’know, googling) various internet merchant accounts.

Suddenly, I fully remembered why I had handed the job over to the lovely people at International City Bank four years ago. Sure, maybe a $0.15 per transaction fee is good, but when combined with the 2.80% discount is that more or less than a $0.25 fee with a 1.87% rate? And what about the batch fee? Or the annual fee? And what if we decided to take ATM cards? Percentages for those are even higher than AmEx rates! Eep! It would take a lot of spreadsheets to figure out all of those variables.

In the end, I decided to fork over for the equipment upgrade (love that broadband signal!) and continue to trust ICB, because beyond the spectre of pumped-up rates (more than 3% at some!), the extra fees (in additional to the normal extra fees) and the security risks, the internet is not the place to be shopping for something so key as credit card processing. It may not matter if you get gypped for the Halloween mask you bought off of ebay, but when you’re talking about people’s credit card numbers, cut-rates aren’t worth the risk.

Just keep this in mind: Despite the commercial, cash still works!