Had I any outstanding debts I would gladly cop to them, but we have none. Still, a debt collection agency named Portfolio Recovery began calling me twice a day this past month. Of course, you can never call them back, because they call from a variety of numbers so that you can’t call them or block them.
I put up with the ringing phone for a month, then finally contacted a free service that TeddyJ provides, and they gave me an actual phone number I could use to speak to a person at Portfolio Recovery.
I did speak to a young woman there. I am afraid I had a tone. I was difficult. I didn’t like giving out the last four numbers of our social security numbers because the first three numbers are some algorithm of the state and year of your birth, and then you have half the number, but I reminded myself I got the phone number from TeddyJ, an esteemed establishment of the highest integrity, so these debt collection people must be somewhat trustworthy.
After I gave her the end of Gary’s SSN she determined that they had a wrong number.
Long-time readers know who the debt collection agency was looking for.
Remember DoppleGary from years back?
Gary X. S_____, the owner of a local furniture company. who never paid his debts and was not in the phone book, along with his lovely wife Elaine? We got calls about his debts, and then eventually the process server came to our house after he abandoned a fancy house in Ladue and skipped out of a home on the beach in Florida. He disappeared after that and I assumed he and his new wife Marla went to prison.
Now I feel sorry for Portfolio Recovery, because they are trying to recover DoppleGary’s debt, and they are doomed. All I could do was tell them the man they wanted is a debt-dodging folk hero here in these parts.
Of course, now that we’ve elected an equally shady character as President, I can’t say DoppleGary will ever get his comeuppance.
8 responses to “An Old Bad Penny Turns Up”
I used to have a visual doppleganger in university, which confused a lot of people. We never met each other, but we heard a lot about the others’ movements (“oh, why were you at X location last night?”) and got approached by acquaintances-that-weren’t-ours pretty frequently! (at least, so I gather from the acquaintances of hers I met [who I initially thought were just faking so as to strike up a conversation, which was a golden opportunity missed to find out who on earth this *was*] and from the acquaintances of mine who reported to me that there was this person who looked like me but wasn’t me that they’d talked to.) Fortunately, as far as I know, she was non-problematic as an individual to be confused with. 🙂
A legendary debt-dodging name doppleganger would be… a substantially different experience… though! Congratulations on shedding this debt-collecting company!
KC – there was a girl in my college who didn’t look like me but had all my mannerisms – a number of people mentioned it.
Fascinating! A mannerism doppleganger! I wonder if you shared some cultural influences, or what was going on there exactly?
KC – people explained that she was very direct and “artistic” and had a deadpan sense of humor that people found confrontational.
Fascinating! How did you feel about that?
KC – enh. They quoted things she said, and they sounded fine to me. She would have fun with people, pretending to be insulted by some innocuous comment. I think I would have liked her.
Yeah, that sounds fine. It’s just often… weird… how people see/categorize you. But if it sounded like you would have liked her, I think that’s a triumph. 🙂
KC – me too.