I got a letter today from Mr J Mosthem. You know J, of course, as the Debt Recovery Manager for The Softback Preview. He was writing chiefly to keep in touch, but he did mention the matter of £120.28 which I owe to his organisation, and suggested that the number of functioning limbs attached to my body might decrease rather painfully if I don't pay up within 14 days.
I was delighted, of course, to hear from old J, but a bit puzzled by the £120.28, because the only book I've bought from TSP since my bargain enrolment package is The Royal Society of Medicine Health Encyclopedia, and that only because I forgot to fill in the form saying I didn't want it, and although I can't say for certain that I paid for the RS of M Health Encyclopedia, I doubt very much that it cost £120.28.
I gave J a call to talk the matter over. As it happened, he was out of the office drilling a screwdriver into the head of someone he'd lent a fiver to the previous week and who had so far failed to reimburse him, so I spoke to a female colleague instead. She explained that I had never paid for my bargain enrolment package, and was now being charged the full cost of delivery. I suggested that it might have been nice to mention this earlier, and she claimed that I would have been sent a bill each month, and as a matter of fact she remembered licking the envelope herself. At this point the tone of the conversation deteriorated somewhat. I called her a lying Nazi whose mother was descended from cockroaches, she called me a devil-worshipping football hooligan with only a flimsy grasp of Gaussian integration, and we both threatened to strike the other from our Christmas card list. Eventually she mentioned that these bills would have accompanied the monthly magazines they've been sending me, which I conceded have indeed been arriving. I said that I would fish these out and see if there was any mention of money owed, making it clear that I very much doubted there would be. Colleage of J urged me to do just that, making it equally clear that she was sure there would.
The next snag I encountered was that, for all my talk to Colleage of J about cross-referenced index systems and filing cabinets that reach the ceiling, I don't actually keep any of their correspondence. It all goes straight in the recycle box: which, as luck would have it, I have failed to put out for the recycled binmen for the last two months. I therefore rummaged through this, muttering darkly to myself about incompetent organisations that thought you hadn't paid them when in fact you had and then, thinking that they'd brought this to your attention when in fact they hadn't, asked J Mosthem and his league of T800s to do you in. I was just pencilling in the details of a plan to sent a T1000 back in time to kill J Mosthem's mother before he was born (little details, like inventing T1000s and working out how to travel in time) when I came across this:
16th March 2002
Dear Mr. Goodway,
FINAL DEMAND
I have received instructions to recover your outstanding debt of £12.48.
Unless payment in full is received within 14 days of the date of this letter you will leave me no option but to cancel your membership and pass this matter to our Debt Collection Agency which could result in a personal visit to collect the debt.
Yours sincerely,
J Mosthem,
Debt Recovery Manager
This was the first time I had laid eyes on this letter. It is possible, I suppose, that one of J's colleagues (possibly even Colleague of J herself) had broken into my house and planted this letter, but I also recognise the possibility that I had thrown it in the recycle box without even reading it, and that the fault is therefore entirely mine. I sent them a cheque.
