During our phone conversation yesterday morning, mom was pretty upset. Because Saturday she’d gotten a notice from her insurance company that she was going to be canceled for non-payment.
“I paid them over two weeks ago!” was what she said. “I’m going to go to another insurance company. No, I’ll quit driving I don’t like to drive anyway.”
“But mom”, I tried reasoning with her, “maybe the check was lost in the mail. Before you do anything drastic, call the bank to see if the check has cleared. But you can’t call today, it’s a holiday.”
So, this morning, she starts off “I’m a little upset, I got a notice from my insurance company yesterday….” Uh, no you didn’t, mom, there was no mail yesterday, you got it last week and they’re going to cancel your account for non-payment because they don’t show receipt of your check. It was a warning notice.
Well, she’s pissed off at the insurance company because they don’t show her payment. Uh, maybe, they didn’t get the payment. She’s having a very hard time grasping this concept. They told her to go to her bank and get a copy of the front and back of her check. So, she’s going to do that today.
I tell her to wait, call first. Because if the insurance company never got the check, they never put it in their bank and their bank never sent it to her bank, so there will be no check to make a copy of. She doesn’t understand.
I try to think of an analogy. Ah, here’s one. “Okay, mom, say I send you a check for a thousand dollars. You never get it. Should I be upset with you because you never got the check I sent to you?” She thinks it over. “I guess not.” And I try to explain to her that the post office has its problems. Like bad employees. Like machinery that automatically sorts the mail and sometimes the envelopes get caught in the machinery and annihilated. “I guess.” I told her that once they mailman picks up that envelope, she’s lost control of it. There’s really nothing she can do at that point, she just has to hope it reaches its destination. And that she’s lucky it’s never happened before. “Well, I sent out two checks that day, the other one got there.” About now, I’m ready to start banging my head on the wall.
“Well, I’m going to sell my car.”
Has she not heard a word I’ve said? I tell her about a problem we had earlier this year. I sent a check for close to five hundred dollars to a supplier in Chicago. A month and a half later, they show no receipt of the check, we’re past due. I check on it, the check never cleared our bank. I cut a new one and send it to them. Two weeks later, the original check shows up. Where had it been all that time? There was no telling. (Instead of sending it back, they cashed it, covered some current invoices and sent us a check for the credit balance, which really messed up my bookkeeping since I’d already paid the invoices they used part of that check to cover.)
Anyway, I think maybe she’s calmed down a little. I sure hope so, because it’s a silly thing to lose sleep over.
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