I AM TIRED OF FIXING OTHER PEOPLE'S MISTAKES

You get a bill and find it riddled with mistakes. When you call the company, they put the onus on you to prove that it was their error. Now you must submit the relevant documentation in order to correct a problem that was not yours anyway. Whether it is an error on your credit file, an incorrect billing statement or something as benign as a misspelling of your name, it adds up to a lot of wasted time. The IRS did not like my filing last year, although it was prepared through a tax accountant. I knew that I had the documentation to prove my case and simply had to write a letter informing them that they had made a mistake.  Granted, that took me 10 minutes to write. However, I had to retrieve my copy of the filing, plus make photocopies of the forms to send with my dispute. It was time better spent elsewhere. Insurance coverage, warranties on products and billings from doctors and hospitals require the scrutiny of Sherlock Holmes and the knowledge of Stephen Hawking. In 1986, I examined a hospital bill for an appendectomy to find that the insurance company had been billed for illogical items. For example, as a male I would hardly need a medication prescribed to menopausal women. Likewise, a single Tylenol pill should not cost $14. Had I not questioned the bill, an automatic reduction of $1,200 would never have been offered. By the time I was done, the bill was $2,300 less –almost half. Ten years ago, I had a check stolen from a department store and fraudulent charges wound up on my credit report. I had to spend two weeks chasing down leads and proving that the account had been hijacked. I went further and tracked down the people responsible only to have the police in that community tell me that due to a manpower shortage they could not do anything. This is the mantra of the age: The consumer must be more than just aware, they must do all the legwork. Hire a contractor and spend abhorrent amounts of time verifying that things are done properly. Buy something on trial and find that your credit card was billed anyway, and you are the only one who cares enough to do something about it. For a short time, I worked at a desktop publishing house in Berkeley. Each day, I would park my car in a two-hour zone and return an hour and a half later to find a ticket on my windshield. After three days of this, I challenged the ticket. Upon seeing me walk in, the traffic commissioner simply asked: “Are you here to challenge a ticket?” “Yes,” I said. “OK,” he replied. “Dismissed.” “What?” I protested. “I didn’t even tell you why.” “Most people don’t challenge it,” he said. “I know I will believe your story.” It seems most people do not want to spend countless hours challenging everything that goes wrong in their lives. I have wasted enough of my life fixing the mistakes that others have made, especially those that I have paid good money to have done by someone else. And frankly, it really annoys me. Our country is going down the drain because people will not take responsibility for what they do. I do not see that changing, despite the stimulus and the grand expectation of recovery. I am tired of having to read the fine print disclaimers because an advertiser wishes to seduce me into a purchase and minimize the risks. I am tired of having to compromise on a principle that should be on solid ground. I am just plain tired. And there I say, “I won’t deal with it.” MisterWriter Originally printed in the Clayton Pioneer 4-10-09