My Bad Day

To be honest, it wasn't so much that the day itself was bad. It was just such a stupid little thing that was blown into huge proportions. I guess some back story is needed.

Before Sailorman PCS'd over to Virginia Beach, he was stationed in San Diego. While there, he was in Oceanside for something (this was like two years ago there's no way I'd be able to get him to remember) and got a parking ticket. Well, I should say tickets. Two of them. He then proceeded to not pay them, because this was all before we were together, and he was Mr. Party, with drinking pretty much every night, spending his time with women *ahem* of questionable morals.....I'm sure you get the picture. hence, he was ALWAYS broke. So he just didn't pay off his two $50 tickets. Then, he had to move and forgot all about them. How someone can just forget about parking tickets I'll never know, but that's probably because I hate having debt hanging over my head and will do everything in my power to minimize it as soon as possible. And once again I get off point.

He forgot about these tickets, and Wednesday we were chatting when I remembered he still had them, and I wanted to get that taken care of. Why not, I have a POA, and we have a joint account. I could totally just pay them off no problem. I thought it was going to be simple. I googled the number for the Oceanside ticket paying people. They didn't pick up. Of course not. I gave it an hour and tried again. Still not answer. Gave it another half an hour and FINALLY someone picked up. I was then told that the ticket had been sent to a collection agency, and I needed to talk to them. Oy vey.

So I call the collection agency and get a rather dim witted woman. I ask if I can pay for the parking ticket and she asks to talk to Sailorman. I politely inform her, yet again, that Sailorman is currently on deployment in Iraq. She says "oh right" and then not three minutes later says "I have an number on file is XXX-XXX-XXXX the correct number to get a hold of Sailorman? I kind of wanted to punch someone by then, and I might have gotten a little testy when I answered. It was more or less, you can try to call, but no one is going to answer because you can't get Verizon service in IRAQ you DUMMY!

I get being patient with people who don't have to live with deployments, but isn't it just common sense to realize that you cannot call someone's cell phone when they're in a warzone? Once again, to quote Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory (BBT) yet another child left behind.

FINALLY I was able to pay off the ticket. I was inquiring about the second ticket when I was rudely cut off and she hung up on me. Oh boy. I decided to try dealing with it later because I was getting pissed off. The woman, Maria, decides to call me back in twenty minutes later, demanding I fax over my POA otherwise she cannot discuss something very important regarding Sailorman. Ok, can you be anymore cryptic? I told her I couldn't fax it, but I'd email it to her.

She made me email the damn thing 3 times because the problem of her not receiving it  HAD to be on my end. I was then transferred to her manager, because I was getting seriously pissed off by this point. Once again, common sense here. Why on earth would I be faking a POA just to PAY OFF SOMEONE'S TICKETS? Sigh....

The manager was very rude, and by the phone call ended with him saying he'd sort this out and talk to me tomorrow. I asked for his manager's name. He then tried to get high and mighty with me and said he was the supervising manager. I replied with a "so there's no one above you?" That kind of popped his bubble and gave me his boss' name and number. Along with a promise to talk to me tomorrow. When I asked when he would be calling, because I have a life too, he said before 10 and then hung up on me. Nice. I then called his boss and left a message saying that he needs to provide better customer training sessions if that's the way his employees talk to people.

The next morning it was just as I had suspected: NOT MY FAULT. Totally their fault, their servers put my email somewhere else, despite their assurances that they don't have filters at all for their email. Liars, every server has some sort of a filter. I know next to nothing about computers and even I know that. My POA "seemed to be in order" (gee thanks for letting me know that) and I was told that Sailorman had another ticket that needed to be paid. I paid it, and that was the end of it.

Just reading that makes me mad all over again. I have never been treated that poorly before, and I can say that I did not care for it. I can understand that they are a collection agency, and someone they have to be mean and rude in order to get people to pay. However, I was not the one who owed them money. I was coming out of my own free will to pay for my fiance's tickets. The whole thing was just handled badly, and really did not need to take a total of roughly 8 hours to deal with.