One afternoon we were visiting our dad, when he suddenly stopped and said, “So I got a very strange and somewhat disturbing letter”. He went on to describe a collection notice he’d received from the newspaper in Northern California, where we grew up. It was an invoice for an unpaid want-ad he took out to sell an old car…over 30 years ago. That was the strange part.
The disturbing part was that the bill, which was originally $19.36, had accumulated enormous penalty fees & late charges and now totaled out at over $5,000.
Needless to say, he was not amused. What he was sure of, was that this was an obvious computer error and that there was no way he was going to be paying them $5,000.
What he was unsure of was how this could have happened in the first place and specifically, how they found him, since he’s lived in several different locations – including out of state – over those 30 ensuing years. It seemed highly unlikely that the Santa Rosa Press Democrat had been keeping track of his whereabouts over three decades, just to collect on a $19.36 bill.
He was completely baffled and really not looking forward to the hassle of getting it all straightened out. We just nodded and agreed with how weird and annoying the whole thing was.
In actuality, though, we had a very good idea of how weird and annoying it would be. That’s why we sent it.
After finding the old invoice while helping him move a few years ago, we quietly kept it and waited to strike. And with a little help from Photoshop, it worked like a charm. The only hard part was not smiling while our dad carried on about the whole thing. Unfortunately, we had to come clean after he told us he’d left a message with our older brother, seeking legal advice. Score!
