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An anecdote about collection agencies: I got this email for a charge of $50 on K-Mart, 20 years ago! Incredible. There actually still are K-Marts, but the clos
by AlbertCory 4y ago
An anecdote about collection agencies:
I got this email for a charge of $50 on K-Mart, 20 years ago! Incredible. There actually still are K-Marts, but the closest one to me is 60 miles away.
Anyhow, they said "it's too late for us to garnish or do anything else with this, but here's how you can clear it up." So no threats.
First of all, I was pretty sure I didn't have a $50 charge with K-Mart 20 years ago, and in any case... 20 years!! They didn't offer any data on what it was. So I sent them all to the Spam folder.
Amazingly, they sent one every day for two months. When I finally looked in the Spam folder, there they all were. They just wouldn't give up.
Finally, I figured out that they were assuming I was someone else with a similar name. I answered the email and said "I'm not him." The emails stopped.
- gwd 4y agoWhen I was a grad student, my roommate had a name which didn't sound super common, but there were actually at least three grad students with the same first and last name at the same time; and two in the same department (let's call it Underwater Basket Weaving). My roommate (let's call him John A. Smith) kept getting in trouble because of this other person (let's call him John T. Smith). Once was when John T. Smith helped make an Onion-style parody paper that included sexual innuendo from a bunch of professors (including one on my roommate's thesis panel). Another was when John T. Smith ran up some sort of debt and didn't pay it, and the collections agency managed to find my roommate's information. He had a hard time convincing them that yes, there were indeed two John Smiths getting their PhD in Underwater Basket Weaving at the same time, and he was the wrong John Smith.