Thursday, March 18, 2010

Yesterday


I was having a decent day yesterday. I’d written a poem over lunch that I was happy with. I had a blog topic picked out, odd for others but not so much for me. I’d even had a fairly pleasant day at work. And then, within four minutes of parking Howie my day went from okay to annoying as hell.

I opened my front door to find a First Overnight FedEx envelope. Hmm, not expecting anything official from anyone so I had to wonder. Before I got any further however, I discovered my house phone was once again not functioning.

I did all the standard things Verizon suggests. Nope, nothing. I called the non-customer service oriented folks at Verizon and got the typical run-around, same as always. They’ll be over Friday sometime between 8 and 7 to attempt to fix it and so-freakin-what if I miss a full day’s work sitting around waiting for them.

After hanging up with the woman who could only be described as hateful, I tried one last thing, calling myself. It’s worked before though not yesterday. But the call did register as missed and then the little window in the phone showed “parallel set on”. Must refer to the one in some parallel universe because I only have one phone of that particular type in my house. The other is an old, old standard phone that functions when the power’s knocked out. Couldn’t find any sort of explanation for it in the manual either. Probably means somebody tapped into my phone and is on hold with someone in Brazil for hours on end that Verizon will then want to bill me for.

So after bouncing around the house for a bit and tormenting the poor cats I finally settled my mind enough to think I could be productive. I flipped on my computer and guess what! I had an internet connection with a dead phone line. Ha! Being magical is damn good sometimes, isn’t it?

Back to the FedEx envelope. It contained a check from a British health care organization for $3400.00 and a letter written in very poor English instructing me to email a certain individual regarding my payment. My first reaction was yay, I can pay my taxes. Then I laughed at myself and admitted it had to be some sort of fraud and no way was I giving them the chance at having my banking information. I considered one of those check cashing places that takes a percentage but decided that probably wasn’t a very good idea no matter how tempting it was to take their money and run.

Today I emailed all the relevant organizations, FedEx, the attorney general’s fraud office and the health care people in order to hopefully prevent these people from taking advantage of someone who might not realize it isn’t real. Yeah, I know, delusional. I also attempted to notify local authorities so that they would be aware that people in this area are being targeted but none of them, local or state police or crime watch, were interested.

1 comment:

Regina Carlysle said...

The phone business sucks!!! Can't believe the authorities weren't interested in this kind of fraud.