Aggressive dunning can kill a man

Press, 15 May 1985, Page 49

Aggressive dunning can kill a man

By

RUSSELL BAKER,

“New York Times”

Since boyhood, Frank Jimpson of Gross Neck, New Jersey, has had a horror of paid bills. He believes it stems from the death of his father, who died during the fourth day of an aggressive dunning by a bill collector for a hospital.

“Dad had had two heart attacks before the fatal dunning began,” Jimpson said, “but it was a $25 bill for X-raying his collarbone that started the trouble.” He does not remember why his father needed a collarbone X-ray, but thinks it may have been because of a fall. “Dad always fell down a lot,” Jimpson told me. The elder Jimpson paid the $25 bill in cash and got a receipt.

The dunning began six weeks later with a 5 a.m. phone call from a man who called himself “Mr Wolf’ and Jimpson “A cheesy 25buck deadbeat.” He promised to tell the neighbours about “the kind of snake that’s slithering round among them.” No amount of expostulation could stop the tireless “Wolf’ from making more such pre-dawn phone calls or from phoning Jimpson’s office to whisper about “that deadbeat ruining your company’s reputation.” This tormentor was uninterested in the receipt proving the $25 had been paid. “Deadbeats like you, Jimpson, always have a drawer full of forged receipts,” he said. On the fourth day of the dunning the elder Jimpson collapsed while waving a receipt at a telephone from which issued the howl of “Mr Wolf.” Doctors spoke of heart attack, but Frank Jimpson believes “Dad was dunned to death for a bill he had already paid.” These events happened 30 years ago and nowadays we have civilised laws. A hospital can no longer hire specialists to foment heart attacks among its patients whose financial records the hospital has botched. Frank Jimpson points out, though, that nowadays other

institutions, and most notably the Internal Revenue Service, have even more brutal ways to destroy people because the institution’s record-keeping has failed.

“How often do you hear of someone who has been bullied and browbeaten and brought to the edge of destruction by some grotesquely monstrous institution because of an unpaid bill?” Jimpson asked. “Never.”

These routine horrors of high-technology society are almost invariably visited not upon the person buried in unpaid bills, Jimpson observed, but upon people who have paid their bills.

The fullest terror of the modern age’s bill-collecting system, he said, is reserved for people whose proof that a bill in question has already been paid threatens to expose the incompetence of the computer that keeps the records.

Jimpson noted that everyone associated with computers begins by telling you the computer is basically an idiot; yet when confronted with a receipt proving a given computer is, if not an idiot, at least incompetent at bookkeeping, the thing becomes churlish and proceeds to make life a torment for anybody who thinks receipts and cancelled cheques are smarter than electrons.

Absolutely persuaded that a paid bill will incense some half-made computer to undertake a murderous billcollection campaign against him, Jimpson makes it a point never to pay a bill until his legal position becomes utterly untenable. “If Dad hadn’t paid that bill,” he said, “he might be alive today. He could have dealt painlessly with Mr Wolf by saying, ‘You’re right, Wolfie; I haven’t paid that bill, but I might pay it in the next day or two. Provided you don’t annoy me’.”

By refusing to pay a bill until frustration threatens to overheat the computer, Jimpson has found that he can sometimes make contact with genuine Earth

people in billing departments. Alerted by the machine’s apparently psychotic despondency about its inability to collect, an Earth creature may interest herself in the case and seek human contact with the apparent deadbeat. Such meetings afford rare chances to pay bills with reasonable hope of the transaction being recorded in the company’s bookkeeping system. Jimpson was bemused by my story of receiving an irrational de-

mand for $2OO from one of the I.R.S.’s power-mad computers and paying it because being cheated of $2OO did not seem so terrible if you thought about what the thing might do to you if you didn’t come across. Should I have refused, and waited until a genuine earth person appeared so I could explain I was being bilked?

“Not recommended,” said Jimpson. “There is no proof of the existence of Earthperson life in the 1.R.5.”