16-IV-2003.

More work for Gary and the event browser, aka BWG (big wide grid). The beast is becoming enormous, there are more and more buttons, more columns in the grid, more pieces of HTML that I'm pre-populating behind the scenes.

Some trouble with the check he last sent me - I deposited the check but didn't see the money land squarely on my account. It appeared and then disappeared...

On other fronts, in rebfpt.prg on 21st I added the option to check for nullable fields. Generated the whole set of routines for Gary with it.

If you find that the amount of 1720$ was taken off your account, let me know, and I'll start pressing my bank. They've already confessed to one screwup recently, I wouldn't be surprised they made more of those.

The bank kept the check, so I figure the only option is to start using PayPal again. We had 43 hours there, plus seven hours meanwhile - so that's 50 now.

I'll definitely change the bank. They charge when they say "good morning", and have lost my payments several times, have been late posting my deposits etc etc. This is just the last straw - not that they didn't cash the check, but that they haven't told me anything about it, just took the money off my account without a single word of warning.

I was using AtGuard, a firewall, to filter out any urls containing /logo/, so the annoying animated gifs from the most irritating sources were gone.

Here's a sample of what I have at Orion, one of the circular mails from our project manager:

The „server banking“ came up on 07-VII-2003.. The scans were about various cards, mostly ski passes, credit cards, loyalty cards.

The grand fuckup with the water billing may have been mentioned elsewhere, but here it is in one place, found the email from some debt collectors, threatening even „possession of the premises unless you pay the Total Due“ or something like that passed to our rental office who forwarded it to me, and replied as stated below.

Subject: Re: MATERIAL NONCOMPLIANCE NOTICE

To Rosenstein Management Co., Inc.

Princess Hill Rental Office, A-burg

Re: so-called “Material noncompliance notice”

Dear J. Hoof

My apologies for not including your full name – your signature was not quite legible.

Thank you for the personalized and itemized notice you sent me – it reveals a lot. First, you know all of my family members' names, and you know where we are, and finally, you know how much we owed. Since it seems you are not so well informed about anything else, as far as our water bill case is concerned, let me fill the gaps.

When we moved in to the present address, the water billing was in unknown future, as presented by the rental office staff. However, the future came much faster than expected, and the first water bill arrived within a month or two (don't remember exactly, but I can look it up – I keep all the bills). To our surprise, the bill didn't come from county's water supplier, and not from RMCi. It came from Midway Services, Utilities Billing Division of Clearwater, FL.

I understand that Midway was hired to do the billing on behalf of the water supplier, which I thought was the County or an agency run by it. And since Midway is the billing agency, I assumed that they enforce payment on their own, without involving other parties – which seems to be a wrong assumption on my side.

You see, the whole story began (and I'm telling this the fourth and last time to anyone in the Princess Hill Rental Office) when I paid the bill for February 2002 on 22nd of March 2002 – at least I thought I paid it on that day. The bill was due on 26th, and I am using online payment services at Wachovia bank. These payments usually clear in two to three days (which is ridiculously long, in my opinion – why are they called “electronic” then? - but that's only an opinion), so I had all the reasons to believe I paid on time. My bank statement showed this date, March 22nd. My water bills showed nothing, because Midway never prints any information about payments.

By beginning of April 2002, I have received a notice from Midway, where it says that I didn't pay and charges me with $7.00 of fees. The fee is outrageus – as is their regular fee of $2.00 - on a $13 bill – but that's a separate matter.

I have called them immediately, and learned that they have received my payment on March 28th – two days past due. They offered me a one-time waiver of these fees, which I did not want to use, because I have, as confirmed by my bank statement, paid on time. I called again and got only the date discrepancy confirmed – but the operator at Midway refused to patch the call to her supervisor. Instead, she recommended that I should write to Midway and attach a copy of my bank statement as proof. So I did.

The March bill arrived some time later, and it still had the $7.00 added to it. Then I made an inquiry in the bank, also online, asking about the actual date when this payment was passed to Midway. They answered later, in May 2002, stating that the bill was paid. Not a word about the date.

In June, I received another notice from Midway, with $7.00 added once more, and this time I complained at Your office. The chief of the staff checked the list of tenants who owe for water, and we were not on that list. She promised she will call them and settle this matter. This didn't help, though, because the notices kept on coming. Few months later, I think in August, this conversation was repeated – she again checked that I am not on the list of tenants who owe for water, and again promised to talk with Midway. This time it helped, some – Midway revoked $21.00 of late fees, which were about $52 at the time (don't know how did they get a number which doesn't divide by 7). After that, the notices and the regular bills resumed their steady pace of $7.00 a month. I kept paying the water and omitting the late fees amount.

I have also spoken once more with the Princess Hill Rental Office staff about this some time this year, but no action was taken, and I was not warned about being on the owing list.

The amount of late fees has grown to $65. I was not once warned by anyone else except Midway, via notices only – they don't know about any other form of communication, and probably don't have any trace of the bank's inquiry. Also, the “this call may be recorded” doesn't sound like “we offer you the recording as proof of your claim”.

Once this year I really was late with paying the water, I think in January or February, and I have added the $7.00 to my payment for that month.

Only last week the bank called me, as a part of a poll on the quality of their services, and I mentioned this case. They promised to check the case, and called back the next day – as the result, they have credited my account with $65.00, thus indirectly confessing that the whole mess was their fault.

This is the complete story as far as this supposed debt is concerned. It was none of my doing, and your personnel has always, each time I talked with them about this, said I was right for refusing to pay something that was not my fault. And now I get this letter from you, which is at fault on several accounts:

- it's late. I have paid the whole amount (current water & sewer, plus the $65.00) to Midway on April 11th 2003, unless the bank causes another delay. This amount was already visible in my online bank statement on the day I received yur letter;

- “The rent payment due for ? to ? under your Lease Agreement has not been made or was made with a check drawn on an account with insufficient funds” is something I would sue you for, if I was a litigative American and had you published it anywhere. You would have to produce at least one bounced check that I wrote to RMCI, but you wouldn't be able to. Also, there was not one check missing – my bank can supply copies of all the checks I ever wrote, for a reasonable fee which would then be yours to pay. I have never been late in my payments to RMCI and you should have known it – but it seems like nobody bothered to look into my file.

- The letter fails to make any distinction as to who should be the recipient of the amount I was supposed to pay – RMCI or Midway. Since Midway is not mentioned at all, I could only suppose that “The rent payment due” means I should pay to RMCI, which has obviously become a collector for Midway, specially the in the language where “must be paid by money order, cashier's check or certified check at the office of the Resident Manager”. “Water Bill” is mentioned, but knowing that I have paid the exact amount for water each of the disputed months, I am really confused by what am I supposed to pay for and to whom.

- There seems to be no trace of my previous complaints. Your staff seems to prefer that none of the above has happened.

- There's a total lack of explanation how is it possible that I was never warned by the staff (this story goes on for a full year now) that I owe anything for water, and quite the contrary, I was not on the list of tenants owing for water, which was at least twice confirmed by the same staff.

- The threats of legal action are taken as such: threats.

Too bad. We had otherwise liked it here. This notice you sent, however, erases much of the good opinion I had about RMCI staff. You could have called. You could have walked the hundred yards to our door. You could have said something when I visited ten days ago. You could have issued a warning. But no, you pulled the heavy artillery first. Too bad.

Attached: a copy of the notice, for your reference.

RMCI replies the same day

Please accept my apologies for the tone of the letter you received regarding your water bill. I was unaware until today you have been experiencing problems with Midway services. As a part of our agreement with Midway Services we attempt to collect all past due balances. If you feel your account is in error and have not received satisfactory service from the 1-800 number, please contact Roger Ross at (797) 456-0283. Mr. Ross oversees the accounting department at Midway and has proven to be very helpful in resolving billing issues.

Again, I do apologize for the letter you received, we are currently looking at alternative ways to sub meter residents water and collect from residents who are truly past due.

There, a whole year's dance about a banking gimmick. I had a similar once, when for intercity phone service I picked some fucken little firm which was really cheap, the bill rarely, if ever, exceeded eight bucks, and I did call Gary and the girls in Richmond. Their trick was that they counted on this banking delays, and intentinally picked their addresses in wolffucks where the post office works two days a week, and sent their bills so that you're left with 3-4 days to pay, and just waited for the inevitable cases where people would pay late. Because they knew what I didn't know then, and learned eventually five years later, when the water and sewer bills were separate. They went to the same company, were printed on the same form, and were identical in everything except the amount, item billed and the account to which the payment went. I once slipped and switched the amounts, paid half the water and twice the shit, and the checks returned. Printed, on paper. Waidaminnit, what the fuck, what checks, I'm paying electronically. Well dick electronic, the only electronics are in the printer itself, which prints them and then they are sent via snail mail (!). I shit on your sound film. We'd better rebuild our sdk out of shit, they whipped money from account to account in a matter of seconds.

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Mentions: 07-VII-2003., Annenburg (A-burg), Gary Brandywine, Orionware (Orion), rebfpt.prg, sdk, in serbian

27-III-2013 - 8-II-2026