Debt collection...

Debt collection...  One of the less-savory aspects of moving to Utah has been a large number of calls from debt collectors.  These people weren't trying to collect debt from us, but rather from people who used to have our new phone number.  The first couple of months I was here, I was getting multiple calls per day from these debt collectors, all for people I'd never heard of before.  Every one of them was an automatic calling system – no actual people were involved.  The amounts of money involved were relatively small – generally a few hundred dollars or less – but you'd never guess that from the assertiveness of the calls.  Very obnoxious, they were.  Worse, from my perspective, is that generally these calls came at 9 or 10 pm – when I was in bed and asleep.

Getting those calls to go away took roughly 10 hours of my time, mostly waiting on hold for an actual human to get on the line and get me off their list.  I discovered that the only reliable way to get a human on the line was to press “3” (or whatever) to indicate that I was ready to pay immediately.  That worked – in seconds I'd be connected to someone who wanted my credit card number :)   Once that happened, I generally managed to get connected to someone who could wipe me out of their system.  It took over 4 months to get rid of them all.

What a pain!

NPR has a good story about how these collection agencies actually work...