One of our freelancers is based in the US and that doesn't bother us a bit. He's an expert at what he does and it's so easy to work with anyone, anywhere these days (and he's also particularly good at early mornings). But honestly, it seems the most difficult part about working with someone overseas is not working with them at all, but paying them.
I was particularly disappointed last week to discover, having made a special trip to the local HSBC bank (an hour out of my day, not very useful), that the woman who had promised me she didn't need a particular code (and who's fantastically frantic typing speed and obvious familiarity with the back button also made me extremely nervous) had actually in fact needed it very badly and the result being that the money we sent came bouncing back two days later. Bad enough, but no one called to tell us. Worse still, when I phoned the only-option central number to complain and try and get the payment sent through correctly, they said 1) still 6 days 2) another £25 charge as it was MY FAULT the numbers were incorrect (even though I'd gone in armed with it)!
Forget it, I said, I'll go elsewhere!! Paypal, I thought, got to be easy! I've paid for the odd thing on Paypal before, so everything's set up, great! Er, no unfortunately not. The annoying thing is, I don't even know why I couldn't get the payment through! I just got a ridiculously unhelpful error message "you have stumbled upon this page from another area". No I haven't, I just pressed CONTINUE!! I then spent 15 minutes trying to get through to a human on the end of the phone, no joy. What is the point? What I really needed was a nice friendly operator on the end of the phone who could have taken me to a URL, showed me a picture of my error message (preferably using our person2person service of course!) and said "is it this error message you're seeing? It is! Oh well that means..." Needless to say, am still ignoring the "phone handling opinion needed" Paypal email in my in tray.
So, two very disappointing customer experiences and 3 hours later (yes, really), I decided to google "wire money". Ignoring the obvious Western Union (why are their outlets in such weird places?), the next option was American Express FX. So, quickly called them, spoke to a nice lady who assured me it was only £10 a transaction and that she would get someone to call me back asap. Lo and behold a very nice man (Hi Marc) called me back to say he could get my money sent in a couple of days and not only that, he was in my area that afternoon and could pop in and show me how to use the ever-so-simple online service! What a relief - and how nice to see a person! I'm just keeping my fingers crossed for the news that the eagle has finally landed...