stevesbets

Over the last couple years I have twice had small debts that I allegedly owed sent to collection agencies. While both were more or less the company’s fault and not my own, the way the two companies handled their respective situaitons once I contacted them to me proves the difference between a good company, and a terrible company. In general, the system of collections is really outrageous, I believe consumers need some recourse.

The first story begins two years ago when I lived at The Left Bank apartment building in Philadelphia. When my roommates and I moved into our apartment, it was totally empty save a cable box from Viking communications that the previous tenants had used. Representatives from our apartment building came in our first day in the apartment to take it out. We wanted to get Comcast cable but the building had some sort of deal that gave Viking, a company no one had heard of, a monopoly on cable and internet access. In order to get our viking cable box we simply needed to go down to our lobby to pick up the box from our leasing office, to me this made it seem as if the Left Bank was an alter-ego of Viking Communications. Throughout our days at the Left Bank, Viking proved to be one of the most horrendously run companies that I have ever come across. Their customer service number consisted of an answering machine. A human could only be reached if there were over 10 complaints lodged on the machine by different people in the same day, the internet went down all the time proving very costly to me, and they did not even offer cable packages that included HD or DVR. When our time at Left Bank was up in June of 2006, I paid the final cable bill and canceled service. We moved out and left our cable box in our apartment to be scooped up by left bank representatives.

I thought I was done with the situation until the fall of 06 when I first received a call from a collection agency. It was an automated message on my voice mail informing me that I owed a debt and giving me a number to call.  A very rude and angry old lady on the other end informed me that I owed 256 dollars to Viking Communications. She could not offer me any hint of what the bill was for, but informed me that until her company was paid they would be calling me every day multiple times per day, as well as sending debt collection letters to my home. Frustrated, I tried calling Viking, forgetting that they have no customer service outside of a machine. As the absurd debt collection calls continued, and with no way of finding out exactly why they believed I owed them money, I decided to call the building manager at Left Bank. He told me that he would call his “contact” at Viking and let me know. The next day he called me to inform me that I owed them for my cable and internet bills from August and September of 2006. (Note that this was over a month after I moved out making it impossible that it was even some sort of glitch with canceling my account, since if it were I would have “owed” for July of 2006).

After 5-6 phone calls back and forth I finally got a hold of a Viking representative who told me that the burden was on ME to PROVE that I didn’t live in the Left Bank during those months and therefore it was impossible that I had the service with them. I faxed them documents that proved my left bank rental time period and my new apartment rental and they agreed the matter was resolved. Sure enough though, a week later another call from collections claiming I owed Viking 151 dollars. I go through the same deal as before to finally get through to a Viking agent. She informed me in the sassiest way possible that I never returned the cable box to the leasing office of Left Bank and therefore owed the money. (They had never said a word about this before while claiming I owed them for August and September).

To make a very long story short, I was assured over and over again by Viking that they would stop coming after me for these fraudulent debts, and over and over again the collections company harassed me the next day and every day. It took over 10 months for them to finally stop calling me. There was a total disconnect between Viking and the collections agency, and the collections agency doesn’t care one bit about rightness or fairness, they only care about annoying the hell out of whoever they believe MIGHT owe them money.

So these two entities were able to take up my time for over 10 months and as a consumer I have virtually no recourse. Even retelling this story now infuriates me to the point where I want to walk over to Left Bank and tell no one to live there because they have to deal with the scummiest company around.  Maybe some sort of company should be created to constantly harass and bother the officers of a company that harasses consumers with fraudulent charges.

This blog tilt has turned pretty long so I’ll save the next story about collections for later.