A T & T billed my company for a $9.99 phone call on a line we don’t have anymore. An hour of phone calls later, some one promised to issue a credit for the call, to zero out their balance.
well, sort of. Somehow or 'nother, NOW, I keep getting $0.68 cent CREDIT bills.
Sigh.
I HATE A T & T
Try getting a bill for $0. I figured cool they put my deposit to the bill. But 2 weeks later I received a late notice for the $0 dollar amount. Spent about 3 hours on the phone trying to get it fixed. The cool thing was the due to another error my next three bills were all $0. Turns out they credited my acount by 3 times the deposit!
I once had an checking account with BofA, and after a few months of anguish, I went in to close it out. I turned over my remaining check and returned my ATM card, paid what I was told at the time were all the remaining fees, and took the balance in cash. We were done. I left smiling.
Next month I get a statement in the mail. It says that I recieved too much money by $0.02, and that there is a $10.00 penalty, and a $3.50 monthly sevice charge, so my balance is -$13.52. Right. I call them up, explain what happened, and actually remain calm and polite while doing so. Not satisfied with their responses, I eventually get bounced up to a manager level person, and it is explained to me that when we closed out my account I was undercharged two cents for various fees, or overpaid two cents for interest or something, and that because I was unaware of this the other charges would be dropped, but I still owed them two cents.
I said OK. I took my statement, taped two pennies to it, added a stamp to the envelope ($0.26 at the time), and mailed it off. Finished with BofA forever.
Next month, I get another statement. This one just says I owe them two cents still. I call, and they say they don’t accept coins in the mail, so the two cents that they recieved don’t count. I say “you just said you recieved them, they are there in front of you. Count them. Finish this.” They say NO. I say I am done. Send me all the statements you want. Charge me penalties up the probverbial wazoo. The statements cost you at least $0.25 to mail each month. You will lose money on this. Stop now. I will not mail you a check ($0.35 fee from my new bank, plus $0.26 stamp) to give you $0.02 you already got from me. They say pay or this will hurt your credit rating. I say FOaD.
I get statements for just the $0.02 for the next 6 months, until I finally get a personally letter from the bank manager saying that he has gratiously paid the $0.02 from his own pocket, and my account is officially closed.
I lost a good portion of my sanity during this experience. I felt like I was speaking a foreign language. They couldn’t understand me, and I was talking slow and carefully enunciating, and even used diagrams where needed. I avoid such situations now, and would gladly send in such a payment now matter how stupid it seems to me, just to avoid the conversations. I couldn’t take it again. I would end up institutionalized. Seriously.
The smallest bill I ever received was a $0.50 credit card bill; my card has a minimum finance charge and I didn’t use it for the month. At the time, I was so paranoid about my credit rating that I did actually cut the credit card company a $0.50 check.
I once recieved a check for $.03, residuals for a HBO special I did some narration for. Kept it on my 'fridge for years.
When I moved out of housing at my college, I received a bill for a little less than a dollar. There was no indication what it was for, so I wrote back to ask.
They replied that it was for a broken floor tile. I wrote back asking what floor tile.
The powers that be wrote again, explaining it was in the living room. I responded, saying that normal wear and tear was supposed to be OK.
Another reply from college, claiming it wasn’t normal wear and tear. Another response from me, pointing out that tile shouldn’t crack under a sofa, and that they had already spent more on postage than what they were trying to collect.
Yet another letter from college, saying they had to collect anyway, and would hold my transcript. I wrote back to let them know I already had a transcript and job and didn’t care.
Unfortunately, I’ll never know just how long I could have kept this going. My mom sent them a dollar after they wrote her instead of me. They spent about $2, plus all their time, to collect $1.
I thought this was pretty silly… one year my income tax refund was like $.13 and they actually mailed me a check for it!
I moved six months ago. I turned off my phone at my old residence on the 13th. So far, I have been billed six times for .$23, because they didn’t actually turn off service until the 14th. They have spent two bucks in postage thus far, and god knows how much to print the invoice every month. To be honest, I’m not paying it simply out of the amusement factor. They included a note that if not paid by such-and-such a date that they will be forced to place me in collection, and that would be even funnier. I’m just amused by the fact that it would cost me more in postage and in writing the check than the actual bill.