Don't Let Withdrawing Funds Turn You Into Chicken Little!

"I'd like to have a little spending money tucked away", said Judey-Chickey to herself one morning. "I think I'll withdraw some of my Vocal earnings and by the time I get it I'll be ready for Summer vacation!"

So Judey-Chickey went to her Vocal Stats page, and sure enough there was a sizeable amount of earnings from reads, and a link to Go To Wallet.

So she clicked on it and checked out her balance. Yay! She had let the amount accumulate since 2023 and there was earning from a few Top Stories, Reads, and even two Runner's Up awards from recent Challenges!

She didn't want to take it all out, so she ignored the 'Click to Withdraw' button and went to her Stripe Dashboard by clicking on that red hyperlink.

What???!! Wait???!!!

"Where IS it?, she muttered to herself. "I must have done something wrong."

So she did what she always does when things look wonky. She opened a Diet Coke and repeated all of the steps she'd just done. Surprise! She got the same result!

So she checked her payout details, going through that rigamarole twice to be sure she had the card with the in-the-future expiration date in the system (check), and of course had to do 2-factor authorization (check) and reset her password (check).

"There", she chirped to herself, "let's check again."

"Hmmm, time to send a note to Stripe", so she clicked on the Stripe Support and chatted online only to have them state "It's a Vocal issue" (paraphrased a long-ass response, but that's what it boiled down to be).

"OK, so now I reach out to Vocal Support, I guess." She Judey-Chickey clicked on the Support link at the bottom of Vocal's home page and composed an email. Just before sending it she did a few minutes sleuthing and cc'd Vocal's CIO (email address withheld for this fable). She added the message from Stripe, gave as many bullet points as she would have wanted to know if someone had asked her for help, and waited.

She only checked her email once an hour.... ok; once every half hour- for the next five days. In between that she checked that Stripe balance.

Judey-Chickey is no quitter (although the way {gestures wildly around with her wings} things are going these days her positivity is SORELY tested!) so she decided to send a reminder to Support.

(Note: YES! She knew that the Vocal team has been fighting spam, and bots, and AI-skimmers, and scammers and {all this}. She KNEW no one had withdrawn her earnings. She KNEW it was something simple that needed to be fixed. She KNEW she could write a story about her frustrations and people would also check their earnings and she'd get reads, and comments. But she didn't want to be Chicken Little and create drama. So she just told MoCo and that was that)

So, not wanting to be alarmist she wrote a reminder, attached it to the original... and just because she was maybe a LITTLE frosted that no one had responded yet she copied someone else. Someone that is even more busy than the Support team. Someone whose name rhymes with Dustin.

And then, because her lunch was over; she went back to her actual job. Just over an hour later-- and two long phone calls and much chickenscratchin... er... typing, Judey-Chickey checked her email to see that J-DUSTIN had replied and in the absolute kindest way possible asked if she had initiated the withdrawal because that's the only way the Stripe balance is updated. If there were continued questions she was to let him know.

Now Judey-Chickey WISHED to sky would fall... or the earth would open and let her drop into it to hide her embarrassment. Of COURSE that is how to withdraw. She had withdrawn once before a few years ago. She took a long pull on a fresh Diet Coke and wrote a contrite 'thank you' response, apologizing, and offer the week cheeping reply that she wanted to withdraw only some, not all, and thank you, and I'm she's sorry, and I'll she'll write a story about this so other people don't make the same boneheaded reactionary mistake I she made.

So here it is:

• If you want to make a withdrawal of your Vocal earnings you MUST withdraw all of it.
• You can't leave a small balance that doesn't mean you have to start all over again before making a withdrawal (in case you were wondering her idea was to leave $20 in the balance a 'chickenfeed seed money' because as a Vocal+ member that's the minimum needed balance before a withdrawal can be made.
• Don't be alarmed if your Stripe balance shows zero. The only way it will show a balance is from Tips or subscriptions. If you get those then they are automatically moved into Stripe and sent once a month. Judey-Chickey hadn't received any Tips for over a year and has never had any subscriptions, so it was zero.
• No matter how long you write on the Vocal platform, no matter how much you know: you can always make a mistake. Own your mistake and learn from it. If you can then share it so others will be reminded, too.

Here's what her Wallet looks like now that the withdrawal is going through the process. It can take a while. Probably she is not going to write any more emails.....