A guy in Support transferred a call to me, saying, “Angela was on hold for you regarding a personal matter?”

“Uh, okay,” I said. He clicked off and I said, “Thank you for holding, this is Michelle. May I help you?”

“Is this Michelle?”

“Yes.”

“Michelle Mook?”

Ah. I know that style. This is a collections call. “Yes. Now who are you, and what do you want?”

It was a woman from Capital One’s pre-legal department, calling to collect a debt.

I have had two credit cards with Capital One for a very long time. One’s got some piddly $800 limit, the other has a limit of maybe $1200. I tend to keep them both fairly close to maxed because I’m financially irresponsible. (Actually, I don’t even use these cards and I’ve been making higher-than-the-minimum payments on both of them for years, but they’re impossible to pay off. Late fees, anual membership fees, interest. They just sit there like black holes. I always intend to pay them off, but never have the cash to do so all at once… or rather, when we do have the cash, we spend it on trips to Telluride or New York.)

This year Brett didn’t work much for several months, and one of my Capital One cards kind of fell by the wayside. When you have to choose which bills to pay, you tend to pay the ones like food and propane first rather than some old credit card you never use. Oh, I made token payments every month, but I was lazy about it.

Some time passed, blah blah blah, and the next time I logged in to make a payment they’d restricted online access to one of the cards. So I pulled the paper bill, and my balance had bloated hugely from late fees, penalties, and interest. I was pissed, but it was basically my own fault. I mean, there were a couple months there where I only made $5 payments.

But how it can be legal to charge over a thousand dollars on a balance less than a thousand dollars escapes me. But there it is. So I find myself in collections, being harassed – at work – by a nasal, mushy-mouthed collections bitch.

I told her I’d sent a payment with a letter requesting payment arrangements and that she should look it up. She said I’d sent it to the wrong department. I said I’d sent it with the bill they’d sent. She said the account was now in pre-legal. I said I didn’t give a fuck and not to call me at work. She asked for my home number. I said she already had it in my file. She said she didn’t. I asked her if she worked for Capital One or not, because they certainly did have my home number since I’ve been a customer of theirs for over twelve years. She said a token payment wouldn’t be enough. I asked her what the balance was, and she said something like twenty-two hundred dollars. I screamed “What?!?!” and then said, “Forget it, I can’t talk about this at work,” and hung up on her.

And I sat there with my heart racing and that feeling of overwhelming financial dread I used to have in my mid-twenties when I was always in collections for everything, and then I remembered – it’s just a bill!

It’s amazing how bad you can feel about debt, considering how little effect it really has on your actual life. I mean, when you’ve got horrible credit and you’re in debt you can still be happy and healthy and loved. Money stress is just plain weird. We’ve got plenty of cash right now, we’re not even broke, but that collections chick made me feel like a loser stoner college student! Argh!