my husband rocks!

there was a bit of drama in the brock household yesterday.  I got a call from a bill collector!  The humiliation!!

So she sounds all nice on the phone, saying that we've been late in payments.  I'm not aware yet that she's not with the company concerned, and so I'm chatting and saying that I had noticed we hadn't been recieving bills, and my husband pays the bills, yadda yadda.  So it's got me a little upset and excited while she's talking and she tries to confirm my address and I'm really only half listening so I recognize that the numbers are right so I just assume the rest is right and tell her it's correct.  Confirm the phone numbers and then she asks me how I want to pay - check or credit card.  Now, I don't like doing business over the phone, and I like to see a detailed bill, since frankly she caught me off guard and I don't know how much we owe.  I want to see a bill and I want to confirm on my side how much we do owe.  So I ask her if they could send a bill to us.  She informs me that the company has been sending us bills and they haven't recieved a payment from us yet, so that doesn't work.  I catch that she refers to the company as them and not us. So I ask if she's a bill collector which she confirms.  Oh.  Ouch.

Well, I don't know how you are supposed to deal with bill collectors and I don't really know my rights, except that you can ask them to stop calling if they start harrassing you.  What I do know is that we WILL pay our bills, because that's who we are, but I was NOT going to be bullied into paying it over the phone.  I don't work that way.  So I told her that I wanted to discuss it with my DH because he's the bill payer.  I didn't know what was going on, so I needed to talk to him first.  She then told me that the sooner we pay, the better since the interest was accruing (a whopping $16 at that point) and they might could knocked SOME of that off if we paid soon.  I again inform her that I was going to talk to my DH about it and he would take care of it.  She signs off saying that I needed to talk to him as soon as possible and have him call her back. 

Humpf.  So I'm all a-tizzy.  I fire off a voice message to Gary, since I knew he was not in his office, but at a meeting.  Then I start digging through our financial paperwork.  Start stacking and organizing by date everything that had not been filed away yet.  I'm snapping at the kids.  I hate this.

I'm very much a rules follower, so this really had me upset.  Plus I was afraid of our credit rating and all that.  We hope to buy our first house in a few years and don't need our credit marred.  We are debt free.  This is an offense to me.

Gary comes home, not happy about the mess I made, but I got it all organized, shredded and filed.  He tells me he'll take care of it.  BTW, he confirmed that we have NOT recieved bills from the company lately.

This a.m. I fire off an email to him because I had forgotten to give him the bill collectors phone #.  He emails me back "done".  He called up the company and gave them our address and they took the bill back from the collection agency and are sending us a new bill.  Ta-da.  Simple.  Piece of cake.  He's so calm in a storm.  So level headed.  He's my rock.  I would have never thought of calling up the original company. 

Somebody in this family has to be calm.  Im about to go over and throttle my neighbor.  They got a set of drums this week.  He plays all the time.  He's homeschooled.  He's really good, so I'm thinking he has had to have had lessons "off campus" before getting this set.  But being good doesn't mean I want to hear it all the time.  This is the second time he's played today, and it won't be the last.  It's only 1:45.  He'll start up again when the boys are doing homework, and then again in the evening.  Yesterday was a double whammy because the neighbors behind us were playing music (bad music) loudly.  This is normally a very quiet neighborhood.  I think it's that way because we all have our windows open all the time and are very considerate for the most part.