Some days you’re just surrounded by assholes. This is gonna need a short setup, so bear with me. I manage a freelance court reporting service, so all of our work involves recording and transcribing pre-trial depositions for various law firms. We are hired by the lawyers (well, their paralegals, but I digress), and bill them directly. Quite often, the lawyer sends the bill off to his client and tells him/her/it/them to send us a check. Usually this works out fine, and we just match up a check with an invoice number and credit the lawyer’s account.
Today I get a polite, but chilly, phone call from an insurance company rep who had received a “past due” notice from a lawyer who had gotten it from us and passed the buck. Ms. Company Rep informed me that XYZ Insurance had in fact paid our bill several months ago, had the canceled check to prove it, and wondered if we couldn’t correct our accounts. I told her I’d be happy to look into the matter and could she please fax me a copy of the canceled check, which she does. When the fax comes in, I look it over and it is a copy of a check made payable to our company, with the correct address and for the correct amount. I double check our accounting program and find no record of ever getting this payment, so I’m about to call her back and offer abject apologies, when I spot the endorsement on the back of the check…it’s not ours. In fact, it was cashed by the lawyer’s firm several months ago and we hadn’t received one god damned red cent of it!
Several phone calls and faxes later, it turns out that the insurance co. mailed our check to the law firm, instead of to us (fuck-up #1); the law firm stuck our check in with the rest of their receivables (fuck-up #2); and the idiots at the bank cashed it for them (fuck-up #3). The upshot of all this is that the lawyer says that he’ll cut a check for us ‘right away’ and drop it in the mail to us. Arrrgghh!
Even though everything has been resolved (I’ll not know until the check comes), it still managed to piss me off for the rest of the day. A simple pedestrian task, performed by businesses and individuals every day, is fucked up in almost every possible way and no one catches it. Jesus H. tap-dancin’ Christ!! Whew, that felt good. Time for a beer and a smoke, then off to bed.
Ameritech, the phone company which is known the world over for its stellar customer service (wow, I almost said that with a straight face), apparently will cash almost anything.
One of our local indie rags published an article about Ameritech’s check-cashing “policy” (I use that word in the loosest sense possible). Apparently, some guy accidentally spelled it “Amerotech” on a check, only to have it cashed. No biggie, right? Well, he decided to experiment a little.
“Ameriblech”? Cashed.
“Amoebablech”? Cashed.
“Phonedogs”? Cashed.
“Cashthisfuckers”? Cashed.
I swear I am not making this up. The article was abso-freakin-lutely hilarious. I wish there was an online version of it that I could link to, but this indie rag is more than a bit behind the times.
My sister is a store manager for CVS, and had someone write a check to Revco (or some other drugstore). She marked it “mispelling”, and the bank cashed it. Is that weird or what?
One time I ordered a pizza from Dominos or somewhere, but then realized after the fact that I had given the driver a check made out to Pizza Hut.
I called them back and they told me not to worry about it, they just scratched it out and wrote the correct name on it. It cleared the bank no problem. Makes you wonder.
The last company I worked for would get checks all the time from customers and have no idea what account to apply them toward, perhaps being unable to locate that name in the database. No problem! Cash them anyway and wait until the customer calls in to complain about getting overdue notices. Then the customer can fax us a copy of the cancelled check, etc. etc. etc.
Obviously these companies are using a different bank than I do. If I try to deposit a check made out to me, but using my nickname rather than my full name, I get the fish-eye from the teller, have to show some picture ID and endorse the check exactly as written - often this means endorsing it twice as I had already endorsed it with my full name.
Silly me, I thought all banks were this anal about handling checks. I wonder how many other times this has happened. We have a lot of outstanding invoices…
Oh, and ReservoirDog, I don’t want my compnay to come across to our clients like your former company did (and still does, I guess). It’s far more trouble to fix something than to do it right the first time. Since I go to the trouble to do it right, I get a bit steamed when others (like the law firm in the OP)don’t. If someone there had bothered to notice that they had a check that wasn’t made out to them, or at least one that didn’t match an account of theirs, I wouldn’t have had to spend two hours or so of my life yesterday fixing it.
I once had a check cashed for an amount other than the one written on the check.
I made the check out to “WhateverthehellmagazineIordered” for the amount of an installment payment, instead of the full amount, as I had that option. Somehow, the magazine managed to collect the full amount, instead of the installment amount that the check was made out for! So those fuckers managed to get 3 times as much money from me as I had paid them, and checks bounced all over the place. It took me a month to straighten it out with my (former) bank–it was completely their fault–and it caused me no end of grief.