Mother. Giver of life, feeder of mouths, lender of money, and it seems… serial late-payer of bills. I have a dialup connection through iHug (now owned by iiNet which I used to use before we got our cable connection through Bigpond. I kept it going after we got cable, since mum’s laptop isn’t allowed on our network. Spyware, large downloads and viruses are inherent with little sisters and stupid users. She uses that connection to get on the net.
So, it’s still under my name, and I expected her to pay the bill on time, and keep me away from debt collection agencies. I should have known better. My sister’s mobile phones which used to be under Mum’s name (as they were under 18) constantly got cut off since she didn’t pay the bill, and they’d get hit with reconnection fees all the time. It was pretty funny to me, since my sisters were always bitching and moaning, and since I paid my bills, I was fine.
Until now! Somehow she forgot to pay several month’s invoices, then when she DID pay, she paid by sending them two cheques, and somehow they got lost in the banking system of iHug, probably since they are still converting to iiNet’s payment system, or whatever. I found one of the late bills, ranted at mum, so we called up and I got it paid through her Visa card on the day. That paid the super-overdues, and the cheques were supposed to pay the rest.
But something the rep from iHug seemed to forget to tell me (or didn’t know) was that the account had already been sent, or was in the process of being sent to a collections agency. So a few weeks later, much to my surprise, I got a quite stern letter saying “PAY NOW OR ELSE WE WILL RUIN YOU! MUAHAHA” or something to that effect. To put it mildly, since there was “iHug” as the original debt owner, I was NOT impressed. A few calls later (admittedly, by my mother, since it was her fault, and she was supposed to clear it up) they said that they would work on it, and get it cleared up.
Guess not, because as I was taking the PimpMobile out for a drive to charge the battery, I turned on my phone (since it was off at work), and found that my sister had sent me a message saying the debt collector had called again, asking for a callback as they were still looking for their money.
Ho hum, I’ve left a message ranting at her about the fact that I need all the documentation for the morning, so hopefully I’ll be able to clear my name of someone else’s mistakes.
I should have known better, I work in customer care at a telecommunications company, and I deal with people crying over their bad debted accounts all the time, generally from family members or friends not paying their half of the bill.
I have nearly always paid my bills on time - the only one I’ve ever let go is my ANZ credit card, since sometimes after interest, I get hit with an overlimit fee and all the rest. I can’t afford to have my credit rating affected by this, I need to buy a house sometime in the next few years, and things like this don’t help me one bit! Hopefully I’ll be able to clear it up quickly, and in the process I’ll be sure to get everyone involved to send me nice letters saying “whoops, you’re clear” and I’ll be asking iHug to send me a copy of my BayCorp Advantage record - who are the Australia-Pacific credit reporting agency - to make sure my name’s clear.
Anyway, time for me to slack off and enjoy my night, thanks for reading another one of my rants!