Ok…So I owe this particular agency, like $250 from an old account that I had that I no longer use. I haven’t gotten around to paying it BECAUSE I haven’t got the extra $$. Single woman living in expensive ass Toronto…its hard. With student loans, rent…i’m barely making it.
They’ve left me messages at home, which is fine. I’ve called them back and let them know that I have all intentions of paying this debt, but cannot do so at this present time. So somehow, they get my work number. I pick up the phone, but I don’t say my company name. Dude starts launching into this whole ranting and raving thing. I ask him where he’s calling from and he refuses to say where. I ask him for his name, he refuses to tell me. Instead he launches into how much I owe and why don’t i pay it blah blah blah. I continue to play dumb and ask him again, who are you calling for. He starts to get all stank with “C’mon ma’am, you know who I’m calling for”. I tell him that he is calling a place of business and should treat it as such. He proceeds to get even ruder and I tell him that if he doesn’t tell me where he’s calling from then I’ll have to hang up. He goes on and on. I hang up.
He keeps calling back. I keep picking it up, stating the company name, he goes on, I hang up. This happens maybe 10 times in a row. I finally give up and and let it go to voice mail where he goes on some more about how i should pay the money, like I took it from his kids or dying mother or something.
He REALLY REALLY pissed me off. So pissed that I called back the number he was calling from and reported him for being so rude, especially when calling a place of business. Its one thing to call my house. Knock yourself out. But how do you expect people to pay you when you call up their jobs like that??? You could get them fired and then what???
So to all the fucking asshole collection agents who have no common decency for people at their work places, a big FUCK YOU. You can bet that when I do pay the bill, its not going to be to your lowlife credit…assholes.
To those of you whom I have dealt with, thank you. Its because of their understanding and little bit of decency that I’ve been able to pay off debts with my dignity still intact.
Whew! that felt better…thank you all for your attention.
I don’t know about Canadian law, but in the US it is illegal for a collection agent to call you more than once per day. I would guess Canada has a similar law.
I don’t know about Canadian law, but based on what I know of U.S. collection laws, if you send them anything in the way of payment, they aren’t allowed to call you AT ALL – ever. So if you send them $5.00 per month towards that debt, you’ll (possibly) never hear from them again. Then, when you can afford a bigger chunk all at once, send a larger amount. But at least send something to show a good faith intent to paying down that debt. I know you’re a poor student, but I’m certain you can find $5.00 per month – especially since you acknowledge that you do, in fact, owe it.
Well, let’s not jump to conclusions. She said her ass was black. I’m sure there are plenty of legitimate medical causes that we could look in to before we go off the deep end and just assume that there could be an entire black person in Canada. I mean, that’s just silly.
As i suspected, the type of harrassment that you describe in the OP is illegal. According to the Ontario Government’s Consumer and Business Services Website, the Collections Agencies Act established rules and responsibilities governing the collection of debt. These include:
Also, check out this page, which is an online version of the Ontario Government’s Consumer’s Guide to Collection Agencies. It has advice about what to do, and gives you the number to call if you want to make a complaint.
If you are going to make a complaint, make a log of every time the collection agency contacts you at work, and it would also be good if you could keep a copy of the guy’s answering-machine diatribe to use as evidence.
Of COURSE, there are black people in Canada. Runaway slaves often ended up there to escape the clutches of the Fugitive slave Act that was enforced in the Northern US. Moreover, there has been a significant influx of West Indian immigrants to Canada–Toronto has an annual summer festival celebrating Caribbean culture, if I’m not mistaken.
We get several hundred calls a day from collection agencies all over the country at the library where I work, mostly because we’ll crisscross a number or address anywhere over the phone for free. Unlike a lot of public libraries, which is why I get a call from Phoenix at my desk in Cincinnati about every five minutes. You’d think they’d get their own damn net access and a subscription to ReferenceUSA.
Some of them are complete bastards. If a number isn’t listed in a phone book somewhere, theres no way we can find it, but those fuckers get belligerent when we tell them so. They often want me to look of the numbers of debtor’s neighbors, so they harass them, too.* I try to hedge on that one. That’s just fucking obnoxious.
I can understand how collection agency call center work can be the only decent paying job in a particular area, much like telemarketing, so I try to cut the people a little slack. It takes a special kind of fucking scum to manage or own one of those places, though, or be an independant agent. Fuck those people with a razor.
*It’s happened to me. A girl in my building had her debt sold to an independant, and the cunt fucking called me a half-dozen times trying to get me to go knock on her door. No fucking way, biatch.
Just a tangent to what gobear said, there’s an excellent cyberpunk/magical realist novel called Brown Girl in the Ring, by Nalo Hopkinson. It’s set in a Toronto thats inhabited chiefly by Carribean immigrants and their descendents after the city was abandoned by the collapsing Canadian government and all of the more affleunt citizens moved into the country. Interesting fusion of two seemingly disparate genres. Highly recommended.
