Another story of CA harassment

I am so upset about what happened this morning with a collection agency that I just needed to vent. I'm sorry if it gets long.

We are in the process of filing Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Not something we wanted to do, and we have put it off for two years...but it's happening.

Anyway, I had a babysitter here with the children this morning so that I could intern. Long story short: power went out due to an accident that involved the sitter's cousin; sitter is frazzled, on the phone with the electric company reporting the outage; the phone beeps in. She answers - the woman asks for my husband. The sitter (we'll call her Sue) said he wasn't here, didn't have a number for him, and said, "No" when the collector asked her to take a message and hung up, going back to the electric company. This collector called her back THREE times, asking why she couldn't take a message. When the sitter said that the reason was the power was off, she was on hold with them on the other line and holding a baby in the other hand, she said, "You should've paid your electric bill." My sitter hung up on her; collector called back. I know the sitter called her an a$$hole when she hung up the second time, but by far this collector was being abusive. The sitter demanded she speak to a manager, and after hearing, "Is that going to make your electric come back on?" repeatedly, finally gave him the phone.

I called this company (RMA) when I got home. Immediately that collector put me through to the 'manager' - she sounded scared too. I asked why this happened - he claimed he had no idea what was going on; agreed she shouldn't have called here repeatedly, but obviously cared less about her actions. Had very many "witty" (not) sarcastic comments for me, such as when I asked him for an address to send correspondence - he started telling me one and then said, "Oh, wrong one...that's the address for people who pay their bills." I tape recorded this whole conversation too. He also asked if we were claiming bankruptcy again, to which I was like, "Huh?" and he said, "Oh, no, that's the judgments...they're in the same spot." Yet he refused to tell me exactly what debt they were calling about, because it is my husband's.

Now, not only were they guilty of harassing my babysitter, he gave me information off of my husband's credit report, and after looking through our documents, this is for a debt that defaulted in 8/1997! Our state's SOL is SIX years.

I have a headache from being so upset about this. I did tell him after hearing he didn't know why his employee did that, blah blah blah, that if he was the manager, and he didn't know what was going on, then he wasn't doing his job. He was actually silent. I then thanked him for the info and hung up, as I hear him trying frantically to say something back.