(no subject)

[the_rck]

I did my PT more or less every three hours all day yesterday. Scott helped with the bits after he got home. That’s both easier and harder because he presses harder than I can or would on the bits that hurt. I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing given that all of it hurts. Today hasn’t started as well with the PT because I was awakened by a phone call (spam, of course) and ended up not going back to do the massage until an hour and a half later. We’re also going to have company for three hours tonight if all goes as expected, and my normal schedule would have me doing the massage an hour into that time. Scott thinks I’m too worried about the schedule, but that’s what works for me. If I don’t have a schedule, I end up putting things off and putting things off.

I did some writing yesterday on the Narnia darkfic. I think I’m going to keep poking at it and see where it goes and if I’m actually willing to go there. In the writing I did yesterday, I discovered a couple of things about Jadis, the villain, that I hadn’t known before. I have decided to use my Jadis story, Faded Colors, for her backstory here because it more or less fits.

The local Red Cross is having a couple of one day sessions aimed at teaching tweens and teens how to be good babysitters. This isn’t the really involved training that includes CPR and such, but I think it could be useful for Cordelia anyway. I don’t know if she’ll ever babysit. She’d probably be good at it, but I don’t see her having many opportunities. My hesitation in signing her up is largely that she’s not going to want to do it without having a friend with her. I’d talk to her best friend’s mother about it, but the classes are on Saturdays only, and that friend has religious school all afternoon on Saturdays. I don’t want to suggest that she miss that for this.

Cordelia complained to me yesterday about how awful it is that she’ll have an ELA (English language arts) test today and will— horrors! —have to write in order to complete it. She’s so very much against writing that I can only laugh and tell her that it will get easier and that it’s a very useful thing to know how to do. I just wonder where she thinks the books she reads come from…

Scott got a comment on one of his ficlets that asked what happens next, and that started him thinking about it. He even pulled up the relevant Phineas and Ferb episodes for reference. I don’t know that he’ll actually write more, but he’s thinking about it and, at the very least, will figure out the story in his head.

We watched The Flash and most of Agent Carter last night. (We need to be in bed by 11:00, so staying up to see the end of Agent Carter was not going to happen. We’ll finish it tomorrow night.) I think, given all of that, that I will need to watch my library DVD without Scott. It’s Mr Holmes, and I don’t think that Scott’s particularly interested in it. He took against Sherlock Holmes as a teenager when he tried to read the stories and bounced hard.

Scott is talking about ordering pizza tonight. I would enjoy that, and I know Cordelia would, too. I’m not sure that timing will work out, however, given the very small gap between when Scott finishes showering and when our guests will arrive. Maybe if I can talk Scott into paying for delivery instead of going to pick the pizza up… Picking it up generally makes more sense because it’s only two or three minutes to the shop, but having only a twenty minute window for getting the pizza home and eating it is not workable.

The last bit of Scott’s birthday present arrived last night, and I’d forgotten it was coming, so I almost opened the box in front of him because I couldn’t think what could be in it. After I post this, I’m going to open that box and the pressure cooker box so that I can more easily store the stuff until his birthday in February.

Cordelia is still going out for a walk pretty much every evening, usually about 5:30 or 6:00, and staying out for at least twenty minutes. I think she’s mostly going over to her school, but I really don’t know. She’s fascinated by the ice rink they’re trying to build in the park near the school. I don’t know that it will last long enough for actual skating given how the weather has been this winter, but we’re all hoping because she likes ice skating. Of course, we’d have to find her skates, and I don’t know that she’d want to go alone or have anyone she’d want to go with.

My sister has suggested that we donate money to one of Cordelia’s favorite charities as a present for our nephew. I’ve suggested Kiva and water.org and am waiting to hear if she has a preference. I’d lean toward Kiva because seeing where the money goes is more interesting, but I’m not sure if nine is old enough to really find that interesting.

And I just got a disturbing call from a collections agency that claims that Scott had a phone line installed in Lansing (an hour and a half to two hours away) in 2014 and owes AT&T about $130 for it. The woman was very snotty about me not having Scott’s social security number memorized. She had the incorrect address for us and had Scott’s middle initial wrong. She wanted Scott to call back but didn’t bother to leave a phone number, so I have no idea how she expects him to do that.

His name is not particularly common, so I kind of fear identity theft, but if that happened in 2014, I’d have thought we’d have gotten hit by something from it before now. I think the collections agency woman was trying hard to get me to believe that Scott had a secondary household that I didn’t know about which… um… not likely, and that’s not just that I love and trust Scott. The only way that would work is if he isn’t actually going to work and is deliberately rolling himself in oil and powdered plastic before coming home every day, not to mention the wear and tear on his uniforms and shoes and how bad they smell. Also setting up such a thing a longish drive away would be really stupid.

I tend not to say that anything is out and out impossible, but this is pretty damned unlikely.

ETA: Oh, and another logical objection to the whole thing-- If Scott were doing something he didn't want me to know about, he wouldn't give our landline as a contact number.

Comments

[lunabee34]

That is really weird. I hope it gets straightened out soon.

[lemon_badgeress]

...Never. Ever. EVER. give personal information to a debt collector, even if they ARE legit. EVER. And this one does not sound legit. Thank god you didn't have his SSN. If they call back, they are legally required to provide you with the caller's name, the agency's name, their street address, and a business phone number, so you can verify them.

[heavenscalyx]

Yeah, the fact that she didn't leave a return number suggests that this was a phishing phone call.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

My guess for the collections agency would be identity theft or some other fraud. I mean the person calling now. It's easier to scam somebody with an old bill. (Was your car illegally parked in the UP yesterday? How about on February 4, 1999? Can you prove it?)

It's also very possible there is some real guy in Lansing, whose first name is Scott and whose last name is one letter different from your husband's. The Lansing Scott didn't pay his 2014 bill, so it went to a collection agency. He ignored the collection agency mail (or they mailed it to the wrong address. Or they mailed it to his old address and it didn't get forwarded.) So they searched for a phone number. Landlines are in databases that can be searched more easily than mobile numbers.

Collections agencies are famous for not caring about accuracy. I had one calling me from 2004 to 2012 (until I gave up the land line.) They were looking for the person who had used the number in the 1990s. They believed I wasn't him, but they couldn't believe I had never heard of him, and would not relay a message. And that was *without* a coincidence of names.

[the_rck]

Scott's of the opinion that it's a phishing attempt. I'm not sure enough to ignore it entirely. I think he needs to at least check his credit reports to make sure that this isn't on it.

I rather think that a phishing attempt would have had our street address correct because I don't think that, given a name and landline number, getting a street address would be hard.

But the probability of a scam of some sort seems high. The amount they're demanding is small enough that fighting over it might not seem worthwhile to some people while being high enough to sound like something that AT&T and/or the collections agency might really pursue.

I mean, UHS was saying, in the online records, that it was going to send a bill for $3.40 to collections when the only reason I hadn't paid it was that they don't actually bother sending out bills for anything less than $5.00. I told them that, if they sent me a paper bill or set up another way that I could pay without physically trekking to campus, I'd be happy to pay, and they decided that they would rather just cancel the bill.

I got phone calls for the previous holders of our landline number (which was mine for three or four years before we got married) for more than fifteen years after I got the number. Fortunately, people generally believed me when I said I'd never heard of Nancy Deeb.

[lady-of-mists.livejournal.com]

The collections agencies as a rule can be sharp dealers and shysters -- though some of them who are "recording the call" are actually fairly pleasant. (I had to handle one of those this week. I just politely told them that a person by that name did not live at this address and for them to stop calling for them. Haven't heard them call back yet -- yay!) Sometimes they are just calling people with the same last name in the approximate geographic area hoping to get lucky.

However, the asking for the social security over the phone makes me think that this particular person was an identity thief trying to get the information from a senior or anyone else that they could work on. My mom answered something like that from the "FBI" once and got a number from them after persistently saying that she would get me the message. I reverse-looked up the number and verified that it was a scam.

(Plus by this point, any person with a landline set up in 2014 would owe a lot more than $130 just with the interest, not to mention the penalties. That's less than 10 dollars a month.)

[the_rck]

She was specifically asking if I knew the last four digits of his social security number rather than asking about the whole thing, and I had the impression that she wasn't expecting me to give them to her but to confirm or deny that what she had was his. She was hitting pretty hard on the you don't know everything about your husband theme in an unsympathetic way, too, which doesn't seem as fruitful a line for phishing as being sympathetic and oh, you poor dear, this must come as a shock.

I did think, though, that it could be a scam because the amount of money is small enough that some people might pay it just to avoid trouble while being large enough to convince people that there might be trouble.

But I plan to have Scott monitor his credit report, just in case this is about a real bill that might get attached to his name somehow.

[lady-of-mists.livejournal.com]

I've had "salespersons" be bullies over the phone before -- I guess each swindler has their own methods of trying to get you to verify information. Some people bend to being berated faster than they react to sympathy.

Plus some of these scam artists don't seem to have a lot of patience; the ones on the phone aren't really looking for the long con, but the quick dollar. They get mad when you throw them off their "schedule" for nothing.

If she had the whole thing, it would seem less suspicious (to me, at least) to try to get you to verify the last four digits and your address... after all, how often would you have someone with the same name and the same last four digits not be the person you were looking for?

But, yes, definitely keep an eye out on the credit report. My id theft was someone filing a fake tax return in my name (they didn't apply for credit, thank goodness), but that still means that my social is floating out there in the ether and connected to my name.