A while back I signed up for AT&T's new whiz-bang everything service. American Telephone and Telegraph is now basically responsible for all my communications. I am pretty sure they are responsible for the communications of my heirs and any instances of me in a parallel universe also. When I signed up, I was offered a deal with $300 in Visa cards, and I took it, because it would offset the ridiculous sum I had to pay to break up with DirecTV, which is about the only company worse than AT&T. Signing up with DirecTV remains in the Top 10 mistakes of my life. Frank McCourt will pay less for his divorce than I did to get out of my DirecTV contract. Anyway, months go by and I see neither hide nor hair of my $300 in gift cards. I always remember this when I'm at the store or on a weekend or something when I can't do shit about it. Today I finally remember to call them during business hours. Lo and behold, they have no record of me ever being eligible for these cards, and even if I were I didn't call soon enough, and yadda yadda. Bottom line, the odds of me ever seeing that $300 are about the same as the odds of me double-teaming Jodie Foster and Julianne Moore this weekend. I'll try a couple more avenues with this but I'm not optimistic. Failing that, I still have the name and contact info of the slick-haired, wrinkled-Dockers-wearing 27 year old community college dropout who sold me the damn thing, and maybe we'll bring back the time-honored tradition of the Wahoo. FOCUS: When have you been ripped off? Did you make an attempt to recover, or did you just chalk it up to the cost of doing business? Did you procrastinate in dealing with it, like me, and screw yourself?
I was lured into a timeshare by my ex girlfriend. I was very adamant about not doing it and she suckered me into it anyway (read I'm an idiot). We're now broken up and I'm stuck paying hundreds of dollars a month (for the next 3.5 years) on something I don't even fucking use and can't get rid of until its paid for. Timeshares are such a horrible thing I do not wish on anyone.
Let's just say that if I were paid back right now for all the money that was owed to me by people, corporations, banks, and what have you, and even subtracted any money that I rightfully owe that I have renegged on or simply forgotten about over the course of years, I'd honestly have about 20 grand. As it stands, I went to Cumberland Farms for dinner tonight because 7-11 is a little pricey. I just wish I could send all the creditors beating down my door over to the people who owe ME money, or failing that, have them all merge into a guy roughly my size and weight, and beat the ever loving shit out of him as recompense. At least I'd feel better.
I had a friend in high school who would constantly borrow money from me. I was young and stupid enough to think that just because she had a single mom and took care of her little brother, I was doing her a favor by paying her way on Friday nights. And she always said she would pay me back. The next year, she made friends with a group of girl who decided they didn't like me, and that she would have to choose either me or them. She chose them. Her reason, she didn't owe them money and she thought if she just ignored me I wouldn't expect her to pay me back. Cut to six years later and she has a better job than me, a husband whose job is also better than mine, and enough of a disposable income to pay for one of the most bullshit overindulgent weddings I have ever seen. Don;t get me wrong, I'm not expecting her to pay me back, I'm just generally pissed at what a shitty friend she was.
Yeah, but you'll get the last laugh. Because when her husband is fucking his secretary in the conference room, and she is sitting in her flourescently lit little piece of hell at 9PM on a Thursday night, you can be out flashing some top boob to all the poor middle aged alcoholics whose wives caught them fucking the secretary in the conference room and getting free drinks. I used to have the worst credit card in the history of credit cards: a Visa from Citibank. Charges would randomly appear on my card (for things like parking, in Louisianna, with a number that was disconnected showing as the discription). I would call them, explain the situation, and fill out three pages of forms. They would eventually get around to refunding the amount, after about six months. There was a bunch of them that slipped through the crack, but they never considered my card number "compromised" and refused to reissue my a new card. Then there was the time I logged on and has a $1,400 finance charge. On a $0 balance. It took almost seven months to make it go away, and in the mean time they charged me interest on it. Which they refused to refund. All told, I am probably out like $100 to them, but it is just the principle of the thing, god dammit.
When I was in Boot Camp for the Navy (circa Sep. '99) we had regular physical tests to prepare us for the main physical test it would take to graduate. At one of these tests, they set up a little AT&T (fuck the bastards) table, offering free five dollar phone cards. Since we had no communication with home except letters and the very occasional pay phone call (which we didn't have hard money for) a free $5 card seemed like a gift. What we didn't know, and what I fell for, was that it was a free $5, followed by monthly recurring charges to keep it active. I didn't find out about this until roughly 4 years later when I tried to get a loan and found out my credit score was in the fucking toilet. Seems I hadn't been paying my monthly bills on... guess what? I owed maybe $140, but, having not known about it, and it being stretched over that length of time, it dropped me down to a 520 or something. God bless the free credit reports (before they started doing commercials), they enabled me to find out what I was hurting on and fix it. I think I'm at a 730 or so right now, but it has taken me years to rebuild from that stupid shit.