So you may all remember my post a few days ago about the Incompetent Telus And Yellow Pages Billing as that company can’t seem to get its act together in terms of paying me back the money they owe me. And get this, just today I received a letter from a collections agency saying that they are ready to take the next step as you can see here:
CBV COLLECTION SERVICES LTD.
Date: 3/19/09
Despite previous requests, you have not paid the above delinquent account.
Your decision not to respond has left us no alternative but to initiate full collection proceedings which may result in added costs, and be time consuming for you.
Protect your interests by sending your payment today. Collection proceedings will cease upon receipt of your payment.
To ensure that your payment is promptly processed, please quote your EDP number on your payment.
Collection Officer Direct Line:
You know, I didn’t know whether to laugh at how ludicrous Telus is in terms of the communication between its departments or feel bad that there must be thousands of wasted dollars on its part for all this human error.
Anyways, I phoned in to the collections office with a mindset that I was going to be entertained on how exactly they try to push people in these situations since this is new to me. I mean, it’s usually the case where the individual does owe the person/business money.
Without saying too much the collection officer just jumped into how this is a fairly new account/incident and so apparently they were prepared to report me to the bureau, or something like that, if payment wasn’t received by the end of the month. Pretty standard I thought where they try to intimidate people.
Not wasting too much time, I pretty much just started to throw out facts how they are the ones that owe me money and that they have repeatedly admitted it was a fault on their end and that they would credit me back. As well, there should have been a report on the account that there was a dispute. In fact, as you all know they even did a semi competent job of crediting me back the interest.
The guy was super confused and he then looks at his computer notes and sure enough there were all these points about how the account was on hold due to a dispute. He was even reading it and then comments how for some odd reason they sent to it to his collection agency to take care of. So now, this collection agency has the account on hold from its end too. It’s like a circus I tell you.
Anyways, I phone back the Yellow Pages today and the funny thing was as you can see the letter was dated on March 19th 2009. The Yellow Page guy mentions that they credited the account on March 20th, 2009 and that everything should be fixed. Lucky I didn’t settle for that though as I phoned Telus directly after and they mentioned that they only saw credit for about $340 coming in. Hence, I would still owe them money.
Afterwards, they transferred me back to the Yellow Pages people and sure enough there was another error as they were suppose to credit me over $703. Although, I’ll give this last guy a lot of credit as he went out of his way it seems to really make sure that everything was going to be clearly fixed. He even marked the account with a bunch of points such as telling them to stop bugging me about the bill and all as it is an error from their part.
How long will this last now still? Who knows. One thing that came to my mind is I wonder what would have happened if say that collections agency did something to damage say my credit report as a result of not thoroughly researching about it first. The repercussions would have been interesting to explore with a three way goof up between them, Telus and the Yellow Pages.
It’s almost like I should demand something extra from Telus for this fiasco. Something new everyday I suppose.