'It’s Just Automatic; There’s Nothing We Can Do About It'by
Vin Suprynowicz
I’m very lucky. Despite what our energetic young bankers-turned-derivative-peddlers have done – are still doing, that’s the amazing part – to our economy, I still have a job. I was going to say I’m doubly lucky because it’s a cushy job that allows me to sit inside all summer in an air-conditioned office, but that wouldn’t be quite right. The reason I have that KIND of job is not entirely luck (though I do give thanks) but largely because, guided by caring parents who didn’t know any better than to condemn me to the government-run youth propaganda camps, where even then the gym-class bullies were beginning to take on the same leveling duties as sergeants in the Russian army, I found the strength to turn the other cheek (as it were) to innumerable locker room indignities, to patiently bide my time and internalize my rage through years of being called “teacher’s pet” and “faggot” and worse, all as my reward for the pursuits which apparently proved I had no testosterone: working hard, learning the material, getting all “As” on my report cards. (Except for Mrs. Stewart in Third Grade, who gave me one B-plus for each grading period, never in the same subject. This caused some consternation in my house, since I kept insisting I had never scored below a 94 on any paper, quiz, or exam. Finally my parents contacted Mrs. Stewart, who explained that she never gave all “As,” because “No child is perfect.” It was my first encounter with a leveler, the kind who are parodied in Kurt Vonnegut’s famous short story “Harrison Bergeron,” in which ballet dancers are required to wear weights around their ankles so they won’t make anyone else feel bad because they can’t jump that high. It never seems to occur to the Mrs. Stewarts of this country that someday we’re going to run into competitors or adversaries who are way ahead of us, and we’re going to need some gifted young folks who have been encouraged to move forward as fast as possible, not held back, yoked to the dummies, because their performance threatens to mess up the grading curve. Check, some day, to see how many of the guys who worked on the Manhattan Project and gave us the atomic bomb attended U.S. public schools.) I learned the material; I scored an 800 on my SAT Verbal (I hated math, probably explaining why I only got a 752 on the math, which to this day I blame on uninspiring teachers, since both math and music run in my family); I can identify all six errors in the currently typical sentence “were likely to loose both game’s of the double heder,” and that’s why I don’t have to work outside with a shovel or up on the roof in the sun like most of the bullies I went to school with, assuming any of them have survived tertiary cirrhosis and still have jobs, at all. I have a job, and therefore I can pay my bills. It’s always a struggle, mind you (I still push a weekly sum down the garbage disposal known as my “401(k),” whose managers remind me of the banker on the cartoon show “South Park,” taking the check out of little Kyle’s hand and saying, “We’ll just invest this in our money market and overseas currency exchange fund, and … it’s gone” “What?” “It’s gone”), but every month I do still sit down and pay my bills. That means some of the bills get paid about a week after they arrive, while others get paid more like three weeks after they arrive. Either way, I aim to pay any bill within 21 days after I receive it. This works out fine for just about everybody. On the rare occasions when one of my payments passes an incoming bill in the mail, the gas company or the water company simply adds the “delinquent” amount to the current bill, sometimes tacking on an extra buck or two as a “late charge.” I happily pay any such charge as the price of retaining the freedom to pay my bills when it’s convenient for me – though always within 21 days. With one exception. My local phone service is with an outfit called Nevada Telephone, sometimes known as Nevada Utilities Doing Business As Nevada Telephone, and sometimes as Excella Communications. (Some of these outfits change their names more often then people in the witness protection program. I wonder if it’s for the same reason.) I received my latest bill from Nevada Telephone on March 19. It had been postmarked March 17. The bill says my $30.69 is “due March 27” – 10 days after they mailed it; eight days after I received it. I wrote out the check on Thursday, April 2 – 16 days after this bill was mailed – but neglected to mail it that day. On that day, April 2, I received a robot phone call from Nevada Telephone, warning me that my bill was overdue, that if it wasn’t paid within 48 hours my service could be shut off, and that if that happened there would be a re-connection charge. I mailed the payment on Friday, April 3 – 17 days after the bill had been mailed; 15 days after it was received. On Saturday morning, April 4, I received a new robot phone call from Nevada Telephone, or whatever it’s now called, informing me my bill had not been paid, and that I was now subject to having my service shut off “within hours.” I dialed the “customer service” number on the bill – 648-1863 – and began listening to “Mexican Music on Hold.” It sounded kind of like Sade in Spanish. Supposed to be relaxing, I suppose. Every couple of minutes a robot voice would interrupt the endless music loop to repeat “Please hold, all our customer service dweezils are still busy,” or something to that effect. I listed for 10 minutes. For 15 minutes. For 20 minutes. ‘THE ACCOUNTANT TOOK MY CHECKBOOK’ Now, normally, I have some sympathy for folks who are trying to collect moneys owed. I know a little something about trying to collect bills. I published the Providence Eagle from 1980 to 1985. I did the collection calls myself. I quickly learned that “Pay your bills or I’ll cut you off” did little good. The stereo shops and motorcycle dealers and close-to-campus restaurants whose advertising dollars were our lifeblood had to pay their electric bills and payroll; they had to pay for their ads in the powerful daily Providence Journal-Bulletin and on TV and on the radio … which meant the new little alternative newsweekly was an afterthought, a “secondary buy” at best. We came last. We needed them more than they needed us, and the answer to any kind of threat was laughter, followed by an indecent suggestion and a dial tone. These guys never paid in 30 days. They took offense if you even called them before 45. I used to swear if I ever got into the business of selling anything again it would be a cash-on-the-barrelhead commodity, something like, I don’t know, heroin, something where laughter was not one of the menu options for customers who were told they were late paying their bills. What worked best was offering to knock another 10 percent off what they owed – instead of adding penalties, like the big guys with the in-house lawyers could do – providing we could pick up the check that day. But what I mostly collected was Excuses of the Month. Call between Thanksgiving and Christmas and it was “I’ve got customers on the floor, for God’s sake! I’ve got to sell some Pioneer and some Teac while the sun shines! I don’t have time to worry about some crummy damned ad I ran back in September! Don’t you dare call me again till after Christmas!” In January it was “This place looks like a battleground. I’ve got blood and boxes and sales receipts all over the place. We haven’t even added it all up. Call me in February.” In February it was “We’re not selling anything! This is the worst month of the year! Nobody comes out when there’s ice on the sidewalk!” or – worse, because it added insult to injury, after hearing these guys plead poverty all year: “The boss is in Florida; call back in March.” But I think I liked the March Excuse of the Month best: “I’d love to pay you for those Christmas ads, but it’s tax time and the accountant has my checkbook.” “You mean he’s got your bank statements from last year. He wouldn’t need your actual current checkbook with your current checks in it.” “No, no, really. He took the checkbook.” I actually got to prefer the guys who ran the grotty cinderblock nightclubs with last night’s barf in the gravel parking lots who took out the smaller ads listing their head-banging bands and specials on pitchers of beer. They never paid a bill and if you could ever reach Vinnie or Buddy or Sal on the phone he would tell you up front that he never paid a bill. I don’t think they even opened their mail. “So … how do I get paid?” “Oh, that’s easy. Drop by on Friday or Saturday night between 10 and midnight and I’ll pay you in cash.” And they did. Out of a bulging roll in their pocket. No written records for any damned tax man to subpoena, see. They never wanted to see anything on paper, either. Though if I suspect if I’d ever asked for more than I was really owed, some important body part of mine would still reside in Pawtucket or North Providence. Then, more recently, I fell into the publishing and wholesale book sales business in a small way, here in Vegas, peddling my own books and a collection of non-fiction essays by my friend, science fiction author L. Neil Smith, called Lever Action. You walk into a local Borders or a Barnes & Noble and offer to sell them some books by local authors, and you get nowhere. “We don’t buy books,” the manageress will tell you. “Wow,” I would say, gazing around at tens of thousands of books on the shelves. “How lucky for you. So the publishers give you all these books for free; you never have to buy any?” “Oh, someone buys them, but they get shipped here from corporate headquarters,” the gals in the unshaven legs and the long peasant skirts would explain, speaking slowly like I just fell off the bus from the feeb farm. “You’ll have to talk to them.” But corporate headquarters only buys from a wholesaler called Baker and Taylor, as it turns out. And once you jump through all the hoops required by Baker and Taylor – International Standard Book Number coded into a scannable bar code on the back cover, agreeing to let them take a 55 percent wholesale discount, that kind of stuff – the best you can hope for is to get placed on a computerized list of “titles in print,” so whenever any geezer who hasn’t yet figured out how to buy books Online wanders into one of the retail chain bookstores and asks for one of your titles, the store clerk can look it up and say, “Yes, we can order that for you, Mr. Cratchit,” whereupon they send an order to Baker and Taylor. Not that Baker and Taylor would ever go so far as to order a box of 20 books and have them waiting in the warehouse, of course. No. They would wait to gather up the four or five orders they might get in the course of a couple of weeks, whereupon they would send me something called a “purchase order.” They’d want me to send one book to their regional warehouse in New Jersey and two books to their regional warehouse in Alabama and one to their regional warehouse in Sparks, Nevada, whereupon I was required to draw up an invoice and send it to yet a fourth address in Indiana, at which point … nothing happened. Nothing happened for 30 days, for 60 days, for 90 days. No checks. Nada. By the 120th day I was festooning my invoices, each of which bore my mailing address and phone number, with red and yellow Post-it notes, which would start with catchy phrases like “You thieves! Don’t you ever pay ANY of your bills?!” I looked up the name and address of the president of Baker and Taylor, somewhere in Carolina. I mailed him a hand-written letter. “I know what you owe me is less than what you pay the guy to walk your dog,” I said, “but is this really your policy, to slowly bleed small publishers to death? Won’t you consider paying just ONE of our invoices?” I never got an answer. I could never get through to him on the phone, either, though I did finally reach some black gal in “accounts payable,” who told me my bills weren’t being paid because my “account had been put on ho.” “On ho?” I asked. “Yes, on ho.” “OK, I think I now what a ho is, because here in Vegas we have the annual Pimps and Hos Ball, but why is my ACCOUNT on ho? Oh, she just thought that as a knee-slapper. She had to tell all the other girls that one. But they never did pay a single invoice. I finally put them on a “cash-in-advance” basis, no books shipped till we received a check, which was pretty much the end of any orders from Baker and Taylor. So I do have some sympathy with folks who have trouble getting their bills paid. But “net 10”? Who the hell thinks they can get away with “net 10”? ‘I CAN’T TELL YOU TILL I FINISH THE ORDER’ Finally, after listening to Mexican Music on Hold for more than 30 minutes, and growing just a tad upset, I hung up, opened the phone book to the page that lists all the competing local phone service providers, and called Embarq, which has also recently changed its name – I think they used to be Sprint. I dialed a local number. A guy answered. I asked what it would cost me to switch over my single-line local residential service to Embarq. The gentleman said they currently had a “special” on such service, at a rate of “29.95 per month, plus tax and surcharges.” “So it’ll cost me about what I’m paying now, about 30 dollars a month?” I asked. “Yes, about that, plus taxes and surcharges,” the man said. “You keep using that phrase,” I observed. “What do the taxes and surcharges add up to?” “About ten dollars a month,” he said. “So you’re telling me that when I just asked whether my monthly charge would be ‘about 30 dollars a month,’ and you said ‘Yes, about that,’ you actually meant ‘about 40 dollars a month’?” “Yes, about that, Plus the $55 switching fee.” Mind you, they don’t send some guy out to your house, any more. This is a $55 fee for throwing a switch in their office and entering your name in their billing computer. But I was actually angry enough at the Nevada Telephone robot to go for it. I told him Yes, I would pay a $55 do-nothing fee, and an extra 120 bucks a year, to get away from a company that has its robot start calling me 12 days after it sends out its bills. The Embarq guy asked what city I was in, which I thought was strange, since I’d dialed a local number. He asked me for my phone number, which I thought was strange. A phone company without caller ID? He asked for my residence address, which I gave him. He asked for my Social Security number (“not to be used for purposes of identification,” it says on my card, issued in 1966), my date of birth … et blooming cetera. “Wait a minute,” says I. “While I’m answering all YOUR questions, you can answer one for me. What’s your billing cycle? In other words, after your bill is mailed out, how many days do I have to pay it before it’s considered ‘past due’? Thirty days?” “I can’t tell you that till I finish the order,” he said. Wow. This guy has a sale in his hands – during the worst economic slowdown we’ve seen in 30 years, despite the fact his outfit is going to cost me $175 more this year than what I’m paying right now. All he has to do is tell me the one sales point I need to hear, the one improvement over Nevada Telephone’s performance that led me to pick up the phone. All he has to do is say, “Yes, our bills are net 30; duh.” And he can’t do it. “It varies according go the part of the country,” he says. “I can’t give you that information till I finish taking the order.” And that was the end of any chance I was going to switch my service to Embarq. Finally, more than an hour later, I got through to a nice young Hispanic lady at Nevada Telephone. “Oh,” she said, “that’s just our automatic machine. We wish it wouldn’t do that, but it’s just automatic.” “So my service isn’t going to be cut off ‘within hours’? You can make a note the check has been mailed?” “Yes sir, that will be fine. It’s just automatic; there’s nothing we can do about it.” “What, like the Martians came down and forced you to hook up a machine that calls all your customers 12 days after you send out their bills? The people who run your company decided to install that machine, didn’t they?” “Yes, but it’s just automatic, there’s nothing we can do about it.” I fear 97 years of the Federal Reserve usurping the power and duty of Congress to coin our money and set its value; seventy-six years of the after-effects of the tyrant Roosevelt seizing all Americans’ gold (you DON’T have any gold or silver in a bank “safe deposit” box, right?); 45 years of an increasingly worthless fiat funny-money dollar that now buys what grandpa could buy for 2 cents, may have created an economic “perfect storm” from which we’re not going to fully “recover” until we get a new, silver-backed dollar and see a lot of bankers’ (and clueless politicians’) heads rolling in the gutters. That said – with no guarantee of its permanence, so long as the Same Old Gang is in charge in Washington and Wall Street – I’m sure there’ll be some improvement from the current recession, or depression, or whatever it is, in another year or two. By that time, a lot of mom-and-pop outfits will have gone under, through no fault of their own.
So pardon me if I wonder whether “copper-wire” phone companies that set their robots to calling and threatening us 16 days after they mail out our bills – and utility companies that can’t even tell you in advance whether their payment terms are “net 30” – may also end up on the scrap heap of history. Hey. It’s a hard rain gonna fall. April 17, 2009 Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow. Visit his blog. Copyright © 2009 Vin Suprynowicz
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