I know someone that got a registered letter TODAY, xmas eve…giving them this wonderful bit of news…WHY would the bank, courts, whatever send this NOW??? Could they not at least have waited until AFTER xmas??? wtf??? Talk about cold and cruel!!!
Scrooge was a moneylender.
Yeah… I got a notice from the IRS that I underpaid last year and owe $240 I don’t have. Merry effin’ Christmas indeed.
(it was an honest mistake on my part, not an effort to rip Uncle Sam off. I had been unemployed that year and had insurance on a loan so they made 6 months of payments…but they DIDN’T send me a statement for it and I was unaware that I had to report it. Ugh.)
Certainly it seems to be bad timing, but surely you were aware that something like this was about to happen sometime soon, no?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s because they were way behind on their payments. I’m not sure if there’s a good time to receive a foreclosure notice.
This. If their house is in foreclosure, I’m sure they’re aware that they weren’t making payments.
If there is a good time to get news like that, maybe it’s 10 minutes after you find out that you have a $30 million dollar winning lottery ticket in your coat pocket…
The computer doesn’t care what religious holiday is being celebrated. Besides, what if the people involved are Jewish? Or Hindu? Why does a Christian holiday mean that everything has to come to a screeching halt?
That and the fact it probably wasn’t mailed out on the 24th.
Not that it doesn’t suck, but businesses can’t shut down for half of December on the off chance someone will get a bad form letter on the 24th.
Look on the bright side: if they got a foreclosure notice, it probably means that they’re currently living in their house rent-free.
Also, what other people said about businesses not calling a halt to business communications just to spare someone’s Christmas-related feelings.
It’s a common tactic of bill collector’s too.
People in debt will often ignore letters, because they expect them. But at Christmas, people send gifts too. So a person ignoring letters or not picking up mail WILL answer or pick up a registered letter or FedEx mail, because they think it’s a present or Christmas greeting
In my business, a good percentage of the folk we deal with get news they consider bad. We process (tens of?) thousands of cases a year. At our last staff meeting someone actually asked whether we were going to hold off on issuing unfavorable decisions just before x-mas, but mgmt said nope. We have pretty aggressive monthly/weekly targets. I’m not exactly sure how we would avoid sending out decisions at times each individual might consider undesirable. Or how we would make up for an intentionally bad week/month. We never ask folk their religion, or what holiday is most meaningful to them. I’m sure people get notices on their birthdays …
And that’s how it should be.
In my opinion, if you’re in a business that sends out bad news notices like foreclosures, but you want to defer such notices on holidays like Christmas, then all you are is a hypocrite.
If you think that what you do for a living is somehow immoral or unpleasant, then you should refrain from doing it all the time, not just in December. And if you think that what you do is reasonable and unproblematic, then fucking own it and carry out business as usual. Stopping at Christmas due to some irrational touchy-feely sense of propriety is stupid bullshit.
Spam reported.
My sister was told that she had cancer on Christmas Eve. Seriously, they couldn’t put that news off for 2 or 3 days and let her enjoy the holidays with her family?
I would agree with immoral, but not unpleasant. And that touchy-feely bullshit is pretty much what society is all about. Pretty much everything we view about being polite is illogical: see that thread about the creepiness of wanting to know someone’s name that you haven’t met.