The Ubuntu Cds are awesome! But where’s my TLA check?

2007 December 4

by jhay | with 1,226 views

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One of my strongest and most reliable source of income from blogging is selling links via Text Link Ads. Ever since I sold enough links that sent me $100 checks blogging has become an even more rewarding experience and investment of time and energy. The TLA checks helped me a lot in getting through school, maintaining my PC and a few extra new shirts every now and then.

One of the draw backs of being paid by check is the long delay caused by shipping. A bigger drawback, risk even, is that there’s a great chance that the check be lost in the post or stolen by someone familiar with how advertising sites are paying their publishers.

In my case, it takes an average of three weeks before my TLA check is delivered to my home. So if my earnings for the previous month was posted at the start of current month, the check itself would be in my hands near the end of the current month! A delay of almost a month is something I got to live with and somehow, I did.

However, for this past month of November, something has happened to me for the first time. I expected the check for my October earnings to arrive anytime soon during the last week of November when instead, the package delivered to me was my 10 CDs of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. The TLA check however, has still not yet arrived.

It’s really surprising as three weeks had already passed and still no TLA check. What’s even stranger is that the Ubuntu CDs arrived too early based on my past experience of ordering the free CDs. By my reckoning, Ubuntu CDs take almost two months before finally arriving here at my residence. So I was really surprised and amazed at how the new Ubuntu CDs arrived so soon. Not more than three weeks when I made my first request at the Ubuntu site. Big props to Canonical for the speedy delivery of my Ubuntu CDs! But TLA people and more importantly the folks at the local post office, where’s my TLA check???

Two days ago I sent an email to TLA regarding this and requested that in case they would send out another payment, better do it via PayPal which is safer and a lot faster. Just a few minutes into writing this post today, their response finally came.

Thanks for the email. I am sorry to hear that you are having trouble receiving payment. We are able to cancel the check and re-issue it via PayPal, however, our bank hands down a $30.00 stop payment fee for all cancelled checks which we are forced to hand down to the publisher. If you would like to accept this fee, and have payment sent via PayPal, please let me know, and we will go forward with cancellation.

$30.00?! That much to cancel a check?! It may be not that much for the big earners but for small-time bloggers like myself, this is already quite a lot.

Having no other choice I decided to just give in to this seemingly unfair policy. With this experience, I’m starting to really have second thoughts in opting for my earnings to be sent via regular mail. Thank God PayPal is fully functioning now in the Philippines. All I need now is to get that EON Card from Unionbank in order to withdraw the money.

Postal Office folks, may God bless you all! As for the other TLA publishers, have you suffered the fate as I? Fellow blogger Aja Lapus has. Let’s just hope this wouldn’t happen again soon.