Facepalm moment

[rose_metal_nz]

Had a tech call in on one of our support lines today...

Gave me the customer's cct ID and I immediately notice there are *no* open jobs. No installs, no faults... Nothing.

Apparently he was working on the street when this lady came out & told him her line stopped working & can he fix it?

If you're wondering if I'm in the wrong place, wait for it...

I check the notes on the account, and it's been suspended for non-payment. Nearly 2 weeks ago. And she knows this because she's called $MyCompany several times about it - with various reasons why she's never paid a single bill (the main one being we never sent her a bill, so she never paid anything - snerk. Like that's gonna work for very long...!)

When I explained this - really, really explained to this lovely tech that he hadn't done anything wrong & that she needed to pay her bill to get service (and that she was well aware of this), who was so worried until the lightbulb came on... You could actually hear him WTF?-ing

Honestly, what?! did she think the tech was gonna do?!

[Betweenshades]

I need to pay for services rendered? That explains a whole heck of a lot...

[chainedbarista]

*points to a brick wall* bang head here, please.

not liable for services rendered? lol...

[Jay 2K Winger]

Honestly, what?! did she think the tech was gonna do?!

She honestly thought the tech would just blithely do as she asked as a means of getting around the "no payment = no service" thing. She was trying to sneak around the system.

It didn't work, of course, but she tried. I'd give her credit for that, but she'd probably try to use it to pay for her bill.

[tollbaby]

I can go you one better Couple of weeks ago, my internet stopped working. AT ALL. Now, not yet having received a bill, and having paid a fairly hefty deposit (to be applied to my first bills until used up) for the service, I was a bit miffed. Called technical support. Spent 3 hours on the phone with them, and the best the kid could tell me was, "All your neighbors have an excellent signal. I have no idea why you don't." Gee thanks.

Fast forward a week, STILL no internet service. I'm starting to be a mite pissed when I receive a bill in the mail. A past due bill. For $200. I call the company back. "Look, have I been cut off for non-payment? And why is this the first bill you're sending me???" NO, they say I'm absolutely NOT cut off for non-payment, and they'll send a technician out first thing Saturday morning. Since I like paying my bills, I speak to their collections department, make my payment and send them proof of it.

Fast forward a couple of days when the payment finally clears and - LO AND BEHOLD - I suddenly have internet service again!!!! Bastards. I call the company back to cancel the tech and they ask why. So I explained as politely as I could (considering how effing STUPID I thought they were by this point) that they had cut me off for non-payment, and since I had now paid, service had been restored, so I really didn't think it was fair to waste the tech's time over it.

To this day, they're convinced they did NOT shut me off for non-payment. Morons.

[Shalom]

Had something like that happen to me, way back when in a previous life I was a locksmith.

Guy calls in to the store saying he's locked out of his apartment, can we come let him in. This sort of thing happens a lot in Manhattan apartment houses, where the doors automatically lock behind the tenant as they leave. It's within walking distance of the shop, so I grab my tool kit and head over there. I arrive and find that:

1. The person standing in the doorway is not the person who called me, but his landlord;

2. The reason the tenant (who is nowhere to be seen) was locked out was that he'd been evicted for non-payment of rent; and

3. The door to the apartment in question is standing open, so there's nothing for me to do there in the first place.

(Note that it's not at all simple to get a tenant evicted in NYC, even if he hasn't ever paid rent; the process can take 6 months from start to finish, so it wasn't simply a case of the landlord deciding to throw him out for being a day late or something.)

Landlord demanded to know who called in. I gave him the name the customer had given me, and he explained point 2 above. Seemed a bit pissed off, though hopefully not with me. I shrugged, gave him the store's business card and told him to hash it out with the boss, I was just the service tech, and walked back to the shop.

[Raveni]

Evictions in sunny Florida are quite a bit faster, so I really do run into situations where tenants have been evicted without ever knowing it was going to happen.

Roomies give the rent to SC to pay, who spends it on other stuff and doesn't tell them, thinking that they will get a late notice or something. SC gets served with a 3-day eviction notice, figures that he is screwed, and doesn't tell his friends. He just packs a bag of clothes on the 3rd day and leaves. Sheriff comes with landlord and locksmith, finds no one home, and changes the locks.

Roomies come home from work, find that their keys don't work, and call their own locksmith because they don't know what the problem is. Landlord sees the locksmith pull up, and the whole thing snowballs into the police being called and the roomies and the locksmith both being tresspassed.

[Moirae]

Ooo, I can do you better.

When I was still dating my first husband, we wanted to move into our own place. Now, my aunt and uncle owned this fourplex and it was a wonderful place to live. They even mowed our lawn for us and gave us a pretty good deal, but it still wasn't quite good enough for us to do it on our own, so we asked a friend to live with us.

Now, it turns out I hated this "friend" with a passion. He once told me "Why aren't you in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant making us dinner instead of butting into the game with us guys". Mind you, this is after I had been playing this game with them twice a week for over 6 months. This would be one of the many things that should have tipped me off that I shouldn't have married my now ex (he didn't defend me) but thats neither here nor there.

The thing that severed the friendship he had with my now ex, is that one day I received a call from my aunt asking me if I knew that he was moving out in two weeks because he hadn't paid rent in three months so was evicted. Ummm... what? I was livid. No, he hadn't told us anything about this. And THIS my now ex decided was reason to throw his stuff out on the lawn and change the locks. This meant we had to move from that fourplex within a month because we couldn't afford the rent.

Some people are just slime.

[Andara Bledin]

Sheriff comes with landlord and locksmith, finds no one home, and changes the locks.

Roomies come home from work, find that their keys don't work, and call their own locksmith because they don't know what the problem is. Landlord sees the locksmith pull up, and the whole thing snowballs into the police being called and the roomies and the locksmith both being tresspassed.

While I understand how that could happen, I don't think the landlord could actually prevent the others from gaining access (unless they aren't on the lease, in which case they're SOL) without filing a proper eviction notice, which is usually 30 days.

^-.-^

[Raveni]

Once the landlord has a writ of possession from the court, there is neither a lease nor authorized occupants.

Non-payment of rent is done on a 3-day notice here in Florida. If no one contests the notice served to an occupant, there aren't even any summons issued by the court or a hearing in the case. It can usually be done in a week in those cases. It's the one area of the court system that moves swiftly around here.

[Cerys]

You mean if someone goes on holiday for three and a half weeks, and the landlord doesn't like them, they can return to find they have no home? Harsh!

[Boozy]

How we feel about certain laws, or how harsh we find them, is better off at Fratching. We can share our knowledge of how the laws work, but adding commentary can lead to political debates.

Let's get back to the topic in the OP, please.

[Cerys]

Good point. Sorry!

[tropicsgoddess]

At least she wasn't a complete asshat like I had with a certain SC that wanted his internet on now despite being way past due and orders to manually disconnect his service on his girlfriend/wife/significant other's account. What did she think, that she could magically get it turned on without paying a dime?! You're not in Candyland, lady!!!