Holy
crap in a Bundt pan...
Due to the
recent well-publicized shortage of
amateur websites produced by assholes who consider themselves to be
clever, I
have been called into action. My name is Jeff Kay, and I’m an
Ugly American living
on the cusp of a mid-life crisis, near Scranton, PA. And I’m here to
serve, baby.
The
State of My Fat Ass A journal of
sorts, updated every once in a while.
--
Yesterday I wrote about my pre-Toney financial shenanigans: floating
checks, using maxed-out credit cards during the cha-chunk!
"do you want your carbons?" days, and eating spaghetti with
whatever canned soup was in the cabinet as a "sauce." I'd
meant to mention an episode in Greensboro, involving Sprint long
distance, but completely forgot.
So I'll do that now.
Shortly after I moved from West Virginia to North Carolina my roommate
got homesick (horny), and abruptly married his girlfriend back home. So
I was left afloat, in a town where I didn't know anyone. I rented a
one-bedroom apartment in the same well-worn complex where Mr. Romantic
and I had lived, and hoped for the best while fearing the worst.
Then my brother suggested he come down there too, and we share an
apartment. That sounded good to me, and I made the arrangements to move
once again, back to a two-bedroom. And thus began an era of
ridiculousness.
Our place was literally furnished with couches and chairs that we'd
found beside the road or whatever, and some of them didn't smell too
good. A big yellow sofa in our living room was perpetually damp, for
reasons unknown, and had a big-ass rip in one of the cushions. The
kitchen would sometimes get so nasty we needed hazmat suits to clean it
up. Indeed, we once had to throw away several nice Tupperware items that
our mother had donated to the cause, because they became saturated with
a funk that wouldn't leave.
It was like The Young Ones, with hillbilly accents.
Once my brother was having trouble getting ketchup out of a bottle, and
decided to use centrifugal force to remedy the situation. He put the cap
on, stepped out into the middle of the living room, and began
windmilling his arm and the bottle round and round. He had that shit going,
when the top suddenly popped off. And before he was able to react to my
wild hollerings, he'd made two or three more full rotations at top
speed. When he was finally able to get his ketchup-machine powered-down,
there was a thick red stripe across the carpet, over the couch, up one
wall and down another, and across the full length of the living room
ceiling. Good times.
Since almost everyone we knew lived in
West Virginia, we made lots of long distance phone calls. We were with
Sprint, back in the days when it was a novelty to have a long distance
carrier other than Ma Bell, and we paid them every once in a while.
Everyone seemed happy with the arrangement.
Then the bills stopped arriving on a consistent basis, and the whole
thing came off the tracks. I don't know why, but they began billing us
every three months or so. And they'd be BIG bills, the kind that
make you blink real fast and whisper holy fuck.
We didn't make a conscious decision to stop paying them, it just sorta
happened. We'd put their packets of bad-feelings in the "to be
dealt with at a later date" stack, and then try to pretend the
stack didn't exist. Eventually the total owed was so large we just
dropped the charade, and decided to ride it out until they cut us off.
There was no point in throwing good money at that beast, it would never
be paid.
But, surprisingly enough, they didn't turn off the service. It just kept
going and going, and the bills continued compounding to the point where
I was afraid we might eventually be thrown into jail. I don't think we
paid them one red cent for over a year, and they never complained or
said a word about it.
Finally, it all came crashing down. They pulled the plug and unleashed
the no-neck debt collectors. They'd call and threaten us with all sorts
of horrible things, and we'd hem and haw and do nothing.
Once, as a stalling technique, my brother asked for a detailed printout
of all the calls in question. He acted like he was shocked, simply
shocked, that the total owed was so high, and pretended to not believe
it.
A few days later it arrived -- in a box. The thing was so large, an
envelope couldn't contain it. It was one of those old dot matrix
printouts on one big continuous sheet of paper, folded down to 8.5x11. I
just about hyper-crapped when I saw it.
There was, of course, but one thing to do. We began unfolding the big
stack, to see how many times it would stretch from one end of the
apartment to the other. We started at the front living room wall (still
faintly stained from the ketchup), ran it past the kitchen and dining
room, down the hall, and into my brother's bedroom, all the way to the
rear wall. Then we started back in the other direction.
I can't remember how many trips we made, but several. And once we were
finished we popped open a couple of beers, and surveyed our work while
laughing nervously.
Then something strange happened. The no-necks stopped calling, and we
heard nothing for a couple of months. Our long distance was no more, but
the harassing calls came to an abrupt end. Cool!
Finally, a man began contacting my brother every few days, always
seemingly on the verge of tears. He begged him to pay the bill, and
insinuated that his job depended on it. Supposedly he'd fucked-up big
time, and the company was giving him one last chance to make it right. I
wrote it off as nothing more than a creative approach to debt
collection, and we took no action.
And that was that. The guy only called a few times, then we heard
nothing more. It never appeared on our credit report, and it was as if
none of it had ever happened. Bizarre.
What do you make of the crying bill collector? Do you think he was
legit? Do I have some bad karma waiting in the wings because of this?
And how could Sprint let things get so far out of hand in the first place?
What's the deal with this deal? Hello?
--
Yesterday I wrote about my pre-Toney financial shenanigans: floating
checks, using maxed-out credit cards during the cha-chunk!
"do you want your carbons?" days, and eating spaghetti with
whatever canned soup was in the cabinet as a "sauce." I'd
meant to mention an episode in Greensboro, involving Sprint long
distance, but completely forgot.