Where did our brains go?

Hello, I got a gift card from a mail order company. Leroy wanted to buy something from there. “Just use my gift card,” I generously offered. When he tried to check out it did not work. We happened to be speaking to Miriam while that was on our minds. She recommended, “Call them they have good customer service, but do not do a chat, rather talk to a live person.” A day later, Leroy tried to call, but the wait time was so long and they just kept looping him through some canned possibilities. He hung up and used the live chat. It actually worked very well. We learned that we had to take the gift card out of the packaging and scrape off the stuff over the code. Then it worked like a charm. Take it out of the package? I got a deal of money off at a store. Today, I went to spend that. It did not work for self-checkout. A young man helped me. He also could not get it to work even when he saw the text on my phone. He somehow made it give me credit. That was very nice. I am glad it was not just me. He unfortunately did not have an explanation as to why it did not work. There was something else I was going to talk about, but can you believe that I no longer know what it was? Paula