At this point, you see, I’m loving my local phone service provider.
We did go through a rough patch a couple of months ago, however, when I received a cut-off notice in the mail.
“What the . . . ?” I thought, knowing that I had paid my bills. I even double-checked with my online bill-paying service, and saw that I had paid the balance in full every month since I started the service . . .
. . . or so I thought.
I called the phone company to inform them in a smug-yet-pitying tone that I had begun the service in September 2002, and had made a payment every month since then.
“Actually,” the service rep smugged right back at me, “you’ve had the service since August.”
. . . Oh.
Still, what the hell was up with that? I’d been a month behind on my payments for SIX MONTHS and I was just now hearing about it?
At any rate, I immediately paid the amount specified on the cut-off notice, and all was well . . .
. . . a little too well, in fact.
The following month, I got a phone bill stating that not only did I not owe anything, I had $27.00 in CREDIT.
Hmph! I thought, feeling smug once again. I knew I hadn’t really owed them that extra payment! They must have screwed up somewhere, but heck, at least they discovered their error quickly.
So needless to say, I skipped my next phone bill payment altogether.
When my latest bill arrived the other day, I opened it immediately, wondering how much my next payment would be. I figured it’d only be about $10-$15, because most of it would have been covered by that $27.00 credit.
Honey, it was even better than that.
Not only did THIS bill indicate that I didn’t owe anything but, despite the fact that I’d now skipped a month’s payment, I now had a credit of $54.00!
At this point I began to wonder if I was reading the damn thing wrong. Maybe those parentheses around the dollar figure in the “Amount Owed” box were not meant to indicate a negative number.
So I called them. Talked to some guy named Ed.
I explained the situation outlined above to him (including the part where skipping a payment seems to have resulted in an increased amount of credit), but alas, Ed was not really qualified (or, more probably, was not interested) to do much more than look at my account on the screen and say,
“Yes, Ma’am, we do show that you have a credit of $54.00. You must have overpaid.”
I explained to him the situation with the cut-off notice, but said that even THAT “overpayment” wouldn’t have amounted to $54.00.
“Well, your account shows a credit of $54.00,” insisted Ed.
So I gave up.
And at this point I’m happy. But several months from now, when I get a bill for a bazillion bucks in back pay to the phone company, I’m taking this little story to The Pit.
Watch for it. 
