Pest Control

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Right after my Mom and I moved into the townhome, we had something strange happen. A postman came to the door and was looking for a woman. Her name wasn’t anything close to ours. We didn’t recognize the name and we told him that we had just moved in.

He acknowledged this and told us he would send it back to the sender.

While we were still there, we got a piece of mail in the mailbox addressed to this woman. It was from a pest control company. We figured she hadn’t paid her bill. We wrote on the envelope, “Does not live here, Return to Sender”.

End of story, right? Nah.

Of course, there has to be more to this story or I wouldn’t be writing about it. Wait until you hear this.

Upon moving away from the townhome and into the current condo, we received another piece of mail in the mailbox addressed to this woman. We thought this was highly unusual because we had already told the postal service that the woman didn’t live at the other place. Why were they sending us her mail at our new address?

It had one of those forwarding mail stickers on it when you move and you want your mail sent to the new location. Except she never moved to our condo, we did.

We decided this was the last straw. We drove down to the pest control office. It was 14 miles away from us.

When we got there, my Mom was going to do the talking. As we entered the door, there was an enclosed area with a small cut-out where a woman was seated at a desk. There were offices around the corner. There were two chairs and a small table in the “lobby”. Hardly a lobby, it was more of a small walking space.

My Mom asked to speak with the owner. The woman asked what this was in reference to. She told her that we had received a bill addressed to a woman that did not live at our townhome and then it was sent to our condo. We gave her the mail and she opened it. She told us it was a bill. No crap! It just wasn’t ours.

The woman said it was the post office that had told them that the woman had moved. We told her that “we” had moved, not the woman. Who knew where that woman moved to. That was way before us.

My Mom duked it with this woman, who I suspect was the secretary. It got very animated. My Mom was yelling back at her when she kept telling us that this woman was my Mom. I interjected a few times too. My Mom produced her license and made her look at it.

She told us that, no your name doesn’t match the person with the bill.

End of story, right?

This went back and forth for a long time.

She even looked up on her computer and said that we didn’t own them anything. We didn’t even have a contract with them, so it would be pretty impossible to owe anything to them. And we DID NOT have the same last name as the woman who did have the bill. What did this person not understand?!

Toward the end of the conversation, she asked us if we wanted the bill back. LOL!!!!!

We told her, why do we want something that’s not ours?!

We told her we better not get anything else.

Conclusion

In the past, we had used this pest control company on several occasions for bugs but hadn’t used them in years. I would not recommend them. If they can’t even figure out that a person’s name is not the same, they aren’t very good.

We never got an apology. We never got a refund on the gas we took to drive 28 miles round-trip. I think we should have sued them in small claims court. They should have paid for our suffering through something that wasn’t even our concern.

Until next time, happy reading!

-Matt

Have you had any mistaken identity cases or downright stupid things like this?