More Weirdness

The weirdness continues… A few days ago I got one of those free credit reports and, checking it, was amazed to see that a debt collection agency, the Collection Bureau of America, had registered a $57 judgement against me, on behalf of PacBell, sometime in 2002. Obviously an error, I decided to phone the agency.

As soon as they heard I was listed as a bad debt, they put me through to a guy who began intoning some very official-sounding legalese about being a licensed debt recovery specialist. I interrupted him by saying “So, like, you’re a Repo Man? That was an excellent movie! The life of a Repo Man is always intense“. He reminded me again that the conversation was being recorded and could be used in legal proceedings.

He didn’t seem to get the joke and insisted on continuing, despite me telling him that his company had obviously made a huge error.

Anyway, he asked did I live or had I ever lived on 24th Street? No, I live on 25th Street.
Did I live or had I ever lived in Oakland? No, I’ve always lived in San Francisco.
Was my PacBell account phone number xxx-xxxx? No, it’s always been yyy-yyyy.

By now you’d think he would begin to see that something was wrong. But he just carried right on asking questions to which he got a negative response, until he finally checked the original date of the account. Finally he began to smell a rat. He apologized for asking the next question.

Were you 18 years or older in 1920? Definitely not, I told him, and asked him if he finally realised that their records were fucked?

Eventually he conceded and is sending me some sort of correction form.

Why is the world filled with morons who try to believe everything their crappy database contents tell them?