Doing the happy dance
Life is who you know.
I told Beth, the Travel Goddess, about my Facebook troubles. (Need to travel? She can help: Beth the Travel Goddess )
Beth runs with friends, and one of them is Jason Shellen, Google employee #603, happily retired at 40 and running with the girls in the morning. He’s well connected, and “made a call”, and a couple of Tweets. The chain of connections was activated, and the word spread through Facebook that there was an issue to be dealt with.
That day my blog, which usually gets about 35 hits a day, got 704, mostly from Facebook people.
I was mentioned (I’m @Chairman) in a number of tweets as one guy told the next about the situation.
Friday morning, I got a call from Matt, a leader on the Facebook Global Marketing Solutions Team. He wasn’t there to just make nice, he had completely researched the issue, read my blog, read our website, knew the advertising history of our store and wanted to know, in detail, how this had happened, how Facebook had dealt with it, how they could prevent it from happening in the future. This was a man genuinely concerned about the process, and a complete pleasure to deal with. He also noted that a number of his staff were Berkeley grads, and Fat Slice was a good memory for them. Great pizza solves many a problem.
Matt was interested in improving their response to customers. While I doubt that cranky persons will be welcomed with open arms at the headquarters, I’ll bet it becomes much easier to talk to a real person at FB on the phone. The page where you place your ad will likely be changed to prevent clumsy non-techie types like me from doing whatever I did, or didn’t do, or should have done, in the first place. This experience will make Facebook more user-friendly, which benefits everyone.
And the charges for the ad I didn’t want in the first place went away. Poof! Life is good.
So from me to Beth to Jason, to Josh, to Sriram, to Anil, to Dave, to Matt and back to me, the connections of life brought about a happy resolution. Thank you to everyone for all your help and understanding.
Totally Unauthorized 
I’m delighted to read of the positive outcome of your billing situation with FB. Lucky you had someone who knew someone. Somehow I am doubtful, though, of FB’s eagerness to solve their advertisers’ problems, else yours wouldn’t have arisen in the first place!