BILL 'EM: DEAD OR ALIVE

A reader writes: "This is so priceless, and so easy to see happening, customer service being what it is today. Be sure to cancel your credit cards before you die -- just in case."

A lady died this past January, and Citibank billed her for February and March for their annual service charges on her credit card, and then added late fees and interest on the monthly charge. The balance had been $0.00, and now is somewhere around $60.00. A family member placed a call to Citibank:

Family Member: "I am calling to tell you that she died in January."
Citibank: "The account was never closed and the late fees and charges still apply."
Family Member: "Maybe you should turn it over to collections."
Citibank: "Since it is two months past due, it already has been." Family Family Member: "So, what will they do when they find out she is dead?"
Citibank: "Either report her account to the frauds division or report her to the credit bureau, maybe both!"
Family Member: "Do you think God will be mad at her?"
Citibank: "Excuse me?"
Family Member: "Did you just get what I was telling you . . the part about her being dead?"
Citibank: "Sir, you'll have to speak to my supervisor."

Supervisor gets on the phone.

Family Member: "I'm calling to tell you, she died in January."
Citibank: "The account was never closed and the late fees and charges still apply."
Family Member: "You mean you want to collect from her estate?"
Citibank: (stammering) "Are you her lawyer?"
Family Member: "No, I'm her great nephew." (Lawyer info given)
Citibank: "Could you fax us a certificate of death?"
Family Member: "Sure." (Fax number given)

After the fax was received:

Citibank: "Our system just isn't set up for death. I don't know what more I can do to help."
Family Member: "Well, if you figure it out, great! If not, you could just keep billing her. I don't think she will care."
Citibank: "Well, the late fees and charges do still apply."
Family Member: "Would you like her new billing address?"
Citibank: "That might help."
Family Member: "Odessa Memorial Cemetery, Highway 129, Plot Number 69."
Citibank: "Sir, that's a cemetery!"
Family Member: "What do you do with dead people on your planet?"

Some urban myths are too good to believe but deserve to be spread.

June 9, 2005 8:59 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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