Scientific American

About a year ago I took out a subscription to Scientific American, a once huge magazine in the world of popular - and not so popular - science. While it is still good and one still picks stuff up from it that one would not otherwise have come across, I had the feeling that its star was waning, that its day was more or less over, taken down, along with so much other printed stuff, by the Internet. Not least, thinking as I type, by the neat animated diagrams which you now get in places like wikipedia, diagrams which can be very instructive and which are not possible on the page. Pictures which really are worth a thousand words.

So when the year was up, I decided that I would not renew. I checked the date on the emailed receipt (turned up in seconds by the search feature in gmail), sat back and waited for a renewal notice.

But instead of a renewal notice, I get a line on my credit card bill telling me that the company to which the magazine has got to run its subscription service has deducted another year's subscription, getting on for £50. Not a huge deal, it had been a points decision not a knock out, but annoying.

So, I contact this company, CDS Global, from somewhere in Iowa, and get the prompt & effusive reply from their computer: 'Thank you for reaching out to the CDS Global Customer Service team. We have received your email and will be in touch to resolve your inquiry soon' - then nothing.

In the meantime, a helpful person in the Epsom HSBC team tells me that it is possible to block these people from taking any more money, if I care to phone up their customer service team.

So, I search out my telephone security number and phone up the number on the back of my credit card. This is about lunch time. A nice voice tells me that they are very busy and I might have to wait more than half an hour to get served.

Try again later that afternoon, same thing.

Try again early the following morning. I then go through a procedure to replace my telephone security number with voice recognition - presence of which is a tribute to computing technology, that you can do such a thing over a noisy telephone line. But having got through that, the nice voice suggests that I try after 0800.

And so, at 0808 on the second day, I get through to a helpful person somewhere in India. After some palaver, she puts me through to another helpful person, possibly somewhere else in India. And I now think that CDS Global will not be able to take any more money from me.

Not entirely sure, because the blocking seems to depend on executing what amounts to an SQL query on the proposed transaction, a query which looks for likely dates and amounts but which does not seem to rely on some reference number identifying the outfit which is trying to take money off me. I shall try to remember to keep an eye out next year. And hope that my scanning of my credit card bills is not too cursory. Another angle is that proper debits which match might get blocked as well; the false positive of the banking world.

In the meantime, I shall endeavour to get value out of my unwanted subscription.

From all of which, I suppose the lesson is that the arrangement whereby companies from which one is buying things can take monies from one's bank account, the direct debit, is very convenient - but it comes at a price.

PS: very pleased to have got rid of the telephone security number. I don't have to remember where I keep my voice or worry about someone else pinching it. Although I suppose that this last will come. Clever chaps these gangsters from the Balkans and other parts east.