{"id":967,"date":"2002-04-28T10:30:37","date_gmt":"2002-04-28T10:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/bologs\/vng\/no-title-permalink-45\/"},"modified":"2002-04-28T10:30:37","modified_gmt":"2002-04-28T10:30:37","slug":"no-title-permalink-45","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/no-title-permalink-45\/","title":{"rendered":"No Title (Permalink)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>People don&#8217;t understand why I don&#8217;t read my mail and experience confusion at the massive pile of the stuff in our hallway. Well here&#8217;s why:<br \/>\n<b>It&#8217;s always bad news<\/b><br \/>\nBills, letters from the bastards at the estate agents about rent increases\/inspection,threatening letters from the bank\/credit card companies&#8230;<br \/>\nOther than that we receive several tonnes a week of pizza menus and money-off vouchers from dire local Indian takeaways with the occasional advert from some church or other that, in an attempt to increase the size of their congregation, will be featuring a dodgy religous gimmick. My favourite gimmicks so far are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Use will be made of a large coloured chart!<\/li>\n<li>Come and receive <i>the anointing<\/i> with the <i>Holy Olive Oil from Jerusalem<\/i><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(Seriously!).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, yesterday we got a phone call. 9:30 saturday morning while I was indulging in a nice long bath. Michele, my wife, got the phone. The call went something like this:<br \/>\nMichele: Hello<br \/>\nCaller: Hello is Martin there<br \/>\nMichele: Who is this<br \/>\nCaller: It&#8217;s Michelle<br \/>\nMichele: Michelle who ?<br \/>\nMichelle: Its a personal call&#8230;<br \/>\nMichele: Well he&#8217;s not going to ring you back if he doesn&#8217;t know who you are.<br \/>\nMichelle: I&#8217;m from MBNA [credit card bastards].<\/p>\n<p>This is a tactic of all debt collectors. They pretend to be a friend of the victim so that he or she answers the phone. In America this practice is also common, but thanks to the FDCPA it&#8217;s illegal.<br \/>\nShe called back later and after offerring me several convenient and easy methods of payment, which I refused on account of not wanting to pay anything, I asked her to make a note on my file that said never to call me again ever&#8230; she wouldn&#8217;t. I asked why they hadn&#8217;t mentioned who they were on the initial call and she said &#8216;because of data protection&#8217;&#8230;.oh fuck off.<br \/>\nFinally she tried to explain to me <i>why<\/i> they call people at home and I had to point out that I wasn&#8217;t interested, repeated that I won&#8217;t take kindly to any more calls and hung up.<br \/>\nThen I went down to the tower of mail in the hall and dug out the MBNA letters.<\/p>\n<p>Included in the package of shit which they sent me along with my bill, notification of late payment charges and implicit threats was an envelope that I could use to send in my payment.<i>Not<\/i> pre-pay of course &#8211; they&#8217;re not a fucking charity&#8230;and to show what a caring, kind, ex-hippy, love-in type company they really are underneath the harsh spikey exterior, they have drawn some nice daffodils on the envelope.<br \/>\n&#8220;Hey man, we&#8217;re not all heavy bread-head&#8217;s here. Groove with us baby and we&#8217;ll all skip down to the meadows toegther and dig the nature scene man and maybe drop some tabs &#8211; <b>just pay your fucking bill or we&#8217;ll send a couple of really nasty bastards round to nick your furniture<\/b> man.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>People don&#8217;t understand why I don&#8217;t read my mail and experience confusion at the massive pile of the stuff in our hallway. Well here&#8217;s why: It&#8217;s always bad news Bills, letters from the bastards at the estate agents about rent increases\/inspection,threatening letters from the bank\/credit card companies&#8230; Other than that we receive several tonnes a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}