Nobody here by that name
I've had three answering-machine messages in the past few weeks from Home Decorators Collection. They were calling to ask that Zucker Allen (sp?) contact them regarding a particular order number.
I tried calling them back a couple weeks ago, after the first message, but it was after hours, and they couldn't do anything. I figured they would eventually work things out with their customer, who had clearly just given them the wrong phone number.
But I just found two more identical messages on my machine, so I called them back again. This time I spoke to a live service rep, who asked in passing if such-and-such street address was my address.
And in fact it was.
Either my street address or my phone number on the account would be unremarkable; that kind of thing happens all the time. But both? That's pretty weird, and obviously isn't just a mistake. I momentarily thought maybe it was some previous resident, but I had this phone number long before I moved here.
The customer service rep said she would mark the account as fraud, and she gave me the email address (not mine) attached to the account. I created a new Gmail account (so as not to give the person my name if they don't already have it) and sent a note to the given address to see if I could find out what's up.
On the off chance that this was one of y'all playing some kind of practical joke: please don't do that. I don't respond well to that kind of thing.
While I'm talking about customer service phone calls, I may as well mention the credit-card call I made the other day.
I had received a letter from one of my airline-related credit cards telling me that, due to a history of late payments, they were dropping my credit limit to $500.
I never use that card, so I was concerned. I called them up to ask what was up.
They said that the card had been cancelled. Eventually, the following history emerged:
In May or so, they charged me the $55 annual fee for the card. I never keep cards that charge an annual fee; I must have intended to cancel this one before the one-year renewal.
I must have missed the billing statement in which they told me about the annual fee charge, because in June they charged me a late fee on the annual fee, and in July they charged me another late fee.
So by mid-July, I "owed" $107 on a card I hadn't used in probably a year.
They sent me that dropping-your-credit-limit letter, and then three days later, without telling me, they cancelled the account.
The service rep told me that this had had no effect on my credit report, so I let it go. I would've cancelled the account back in May if I'd noticed it, anyway.
So the outcome was much better than it could've been. Still, kind of odd.