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How Are You Feeling Right Now?

LumberJack

Huggy Bear 🐻 u r warned!
SF Supporter
I’m losing my mind. Troubles with customer service, since Thursday, just keeps getting more insane for every day. Now they are inventing invoice numbers out of thin air. I guess there are no humans behind the screen. Just automatic replies and “A.I“. I wrote a well put together email yesterday and even tried to connect on a human level, but no.. Just an automatic reply, that pretends to be not that.

It’s going to kill me. Barely made it yesterday. What usually stops me is that I don’t want leave a mess behind. But today I’m just thinking what is the least I need to do.. Maybe just clear out the most private papers. And I already have a folder ready “In case of my death” to whom it may concern.

But I guess I need to respond to the fictitious invoice first. But I’m afraid what I will do if I can’t get through to a real human being.
What if you were to simply ignore the invoice? I don’t know the circumstances of your situation, but when I was the treasurer of a nonprofit, I saw the occasional complete scam invoice come in, usually for some really vague thing like “internet service,” but in the fine print it would say that it was a promotional service that they would subscribe you to upon paying the “invoice.”

Seems to be a scam trying to take advantage of orgs with accts payable depts that just pay anything that looks like an invoice and then the scammers get monthly revenue until someone notices and pulls the plug. Especially insidious because there’s usually a threshold for a monthly subscription to get attention, and the scam is designed to fly under the radar of that threshold.

If it’s completely fictitious, though, then why bother with it? Do you have a signed credit agreement with them? If not then they can’t hurt your credit score. It’s generally my tactic to make them come after me.
 
If it’s completely fictitious, though, then why bother with it? Do you have a signed credit agreement with them? If not then they can’t hurt your credit score. It’s generally my tactic to make them come after me.
First, thank you for your reply. Very much needed to hear from someone that is certainly not a robot.

It’s relating to a legit invoice from a legit bank. An invoice I paid, they recognize I have paid, but never actually register as paid. From there things have gone insane. They try to fix it but it just creates more problems. Their system seems incapable of solving something that is its own fault, there seems to be no log of my many contacts with customer service or what actions they have taken. A.I. is reading the emails for them. So it has become an absolute insane mess.

Now somehow a ghost invoice. But I guess now that it will disappear when the main problem get sorted.

I think I got the main problem sorted this afternoon. But I’ll know tomorrow.
 

LumberJack

Huggy Bear 🐻 u r warned!
SF Supporter
First, thank you for your reply. Very much needed to hear from someone that is certainly not a robot.

It’s relating to a legit invoice from a legit bank. An invoice I paid, they recognize I have paid, but never actually register as paid. From there things have gone insane. They try to fix it but it just creates more problems. Their system seems incapable of solving something that is its own fault, there seems to be no log of my many contacts with customer service or what actions they have taken. A.I. is reading the emails for them. So it has become an absolute insane mess.

Now somehow a ghost invoice. But I guess now that it will disappear when the main problem get sorted.

I think I got the main problem sorted this afternoon. But I’ll know tomorrow.
Still sounds like "not your problem" at this point. I cannot advise because I am neither certified nor chartered, but just as an individual with some knowledge of accounting and collections by larger corps (work experience in the FP&A dept of a major insurance carrier), my money is still on the side of this being unlikely to end up in collections from their A/P dept.

If it does, you can try getting their internal collections dept to figure it out. It doesn't hit your credit score until it gets reported to Equifax and the other 2 - at which point I would normally say you can challenge that as a false report with the 3 credit bureaus. However, the emphasis is on "normally." Given that the current executive branch administration gutted the CFPB early last year, I am sure that banks now have less fear of being fined by them.

It's not that anything has particularly changed with the laws, but larger banks have a history of bilking customers and racking up fines in the $billions every year. Now that the CFPB has lost its "teeth" so to speak, I'm sure they are going ahead with stuff they would have thought twice about before. Business strategy and corporate incentive structures emphasize greed at all costs. If they think they can boost their revenue or not pay a debt, they will do it 999 times of every 1,000. IMHO, of course!

PS - I may join you on the cinnamon bun!
 
So far gone deep down. Nothing I do is safe from my doubts. I judge everything as an exercise in futility and shut down before they have a chance to disappoint me. This is an example of avoidance-avoidance conflict in psychology—a forced choice between two equally undesirable options. For me, it’s either depression or overwhelming anxiety, and 99.99% of the time I’m choosing depression. Depression was my preferred coping mechanism in the past, but now I don’t know how to stop. It’s essentially procrastination but far more subtle and intricate.
 
I used to go back home twice a year. It was how I functioned and how I managed to not lose my mind abroad. Now I am basically living in exile. The moment I set foot in Iran I will be arrested or something worse actually, for the crime of posting some stories or peacefully protesting in Europe. It’s not just me but thousands of Iranian diaspora are in the same situation. It’s too dark for this website to even explore further. I miss my mother’s voice and they are all offline. Then again my people went through worse and lost their kids/parents during January and their families are arrested or tortured now. So I will keep having hope for one more day. As everyday.
 

SillyOldBear

Teddy Bears Rule! 🐻
Staff Alumni
I was reading the news and had to turn it off. I'm feeling disappointment and frustration about the powers that be and the increasingly polarised country. I'm holding to a perhaps irrational hope for anomalous peacefulness to emerge from humans. Might as well hope for it.
I am glad you have hope. I just looked at the headlines on Fox News. Its not just the country that's polarized. Its the whole dang world!
 

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