i'm supposed to be the 'family manager'... manager of schedules, manager of schoolwork, manager of meals, manager of chores, manager of shopping, manager of bills, manager of moving, and manager of all the other things i can't think of right now. it's one of the reasons doc M has called me girl friday for so long. he usually doesn't schedule anything without checking with me first. i don't really ever claim that i do much around here, but there are a few systems that have been in place forever and they just have become second-nature. but this morning i guess i was rudely proven that i'm not so good at my job. (it wouldn't be the first time)
i manage all of our bills through the bill-pay service that our credit union offers without any fees attached. it's so nice that i rarely ever have to write a check. i hated writing checks. and things just pile up on my desk and then would get paid late because they were buried by other things that didn't have any business being on my desk. now i can keep track of all the bills in one place and most of them automatically pay each month. some i just have to click a button and tell it what date to send the payment, and then i never have to think about it again. and i rarely watch the amounts because most of them are the same every month. i don't get any paper statements in the mail anymore so i don't see the amount that way either. well, i guess i need to pay closer attention to the amounts. we just sent a gigantic payment to sprint for our cell phone bill.
my bank will email me whenever electronic payments have been sent. so usually i just scan through the email to make a note of which bills just got paid and then delete the email. when the bill comes through to the bank, then i schedule the payment immediately. it doesn't pay immediately, but i schedule it immediately to pay near the due date, otherwise if i let it sit then i forget about it and it becomes late. so i schedule it and then forget about it. until the email comes through my inbox, reminding me of how much money just went out. so when i got the email this morning saying $586.83 went out, i was curious where it went to. i didn't remember sending that much out. (but, i forget a lot of things). then when i noticed it went to sprint, i got a little nervous. but i thought - perhaps i forgot to pay it last month and that was 2 months worth. which would still be high for 2 months but i was trying to make myself feel better. then i thought maybe i accidently hit the wrong numbers when i scheduled the bill to be paid. but that wouldn't make sense either since i don't even type the amount. i just click a button that tells it to pay whatever it is asking for. so i log onto sprint's website to pull the actual statement. it was not the wrong amount. and it was NOT 2 months worth. i began to panic. and, as monk would say... here's what happened:
back in january i got a new phone. because it was so much newer than the previous thing i had been using, i could no longer stay with the phone plan i had been using. so i had to change my phone plan which messed up the other 2 phones we have in the family. it meant that i could no longer have 3rd line for free. and it meant that our shared minutes would be lowered. that part didn't really matter because we weren't using all our minutes anyway. but the part about the 3rd line was HUGE. we use it to communicate with the kids whenever we're not home, so keeping it really was a matter of safety to us. so we sucked it up and said we'd pay for the 'add-on' of the 3rd line. we weren't happy about the increase but we figured we had no choice. but with that, it meant that the 3rd line now had all the same services the other 2 phones had. this was not the case before. so we told the kids that they could now txt message with no extra costs. so for 6 weeks we've been txt messaging on that phone and been charged 20 cents EVERY SINGLE TIME! well, $160 later... and of course i already missed it on part of the last bill. but the almost $600 didn't escape me this time. well, i guess it did since the payment already went. the doc said to just not pay the bill until they correct it, but unfortunately (in thinking that i had a good system in place) i already had the payment sent.
now we get to fight sprint over the phone tomorrow and hope they were recording the call where i said to add the 3rd line on. and then on top of that, we get to hope that they'll make it all retroactive and credit us back the over $400 of over charges. because not only did they leave the 3rd line off, but they didn't change the 2nd phone to the new plan either. so all the times that the doc called anyone other than me, he was charged for the minutes!
snowstorm, cleaning, packing, carpet quote, painting, school.... i REALLY didn't want ONE more thing to think about tomorrow!
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