Don't you hate it...

[~Hestia~]

when you get an overdue notice for a bill you never received in the first place

Ah well...

[toomanyshoes]

I literally just got one of those!

Apparently I didn't pay for some pathology done close to 12months ago? And now I have a letter from a debt collector, I shall be calling them shortly!

[Rivlas]

When I have been sent one of these I just ring them and say this is the first notice I have received from them and then ask when the letter was sent.
They are usually pretty good and will give you extra time to pay if you need it.

[Sopdet]

I used to get that all the time at my old place, which is why I registered to receive my bills online (through my internet banking).

I did get one the other day, for my old place (from redirected mail), for the final account, I rang them up and blasted them, I'd been ringing pretty-much every week since I moved out to get final amount and they couldn't tell me it, I'd also given them my new address to send the final bill to, I had a record of every date I rang them, funnily enough I rang them after they'd issued the first bill (which I never got) but they couldn't tell me the amount.

[Ca Plane Pour Moi]

I have had two envelopes in the post before - one saying "You are overdue and we will take steps blah blah blah and reposess your house blah blah blah sell you son as a slave sort of thing", then open the second, dated the same day, basically saying "Hi, you owe us £X, can you call and pay it within three months (no interest)?"

I call them and lay into them. Then wait for two and a half months and pay them back. OK, I know I owe money, but if I call up a month earlier and ask to pay and you say not to bother yet... I ain't going to bother until I have to with that treatment. Twice. Damn government company I have to use.

[deletedit]

I get these all the time from Telstra. They do send the first bills out, really they do.

Thing is, they send them to a random address of mine that I used to live in, say, in 2003. Then one day when we ring up for some other stuffup, the phone guys says "hey, you've got multiple accounts, lets roll them together" and they do, and we get an overdue bill for some weird fraction of our bill that they've been sending to some other address for a year for $2 a month or something.

And this has happened MULTIPLE TIMES.

The most recent one was a few weeks ago, when I got an email to say my bill got returned "not at this address". Turns out I'd signed up to Bigpond Music, which used the address I had on file since 1998, and I had enough credit on that account to go 4 months before it got into debit. So I had this bill for 15c floating around in the system. Phone guy generously waived the 15c bill and declared that he'd roll all our accounts into one. Again.

Why do Telstra insist on making a new account for you every time you move or get a new mobile phone or internet plan anyway? And then, why can't they use the active billing address on the system instead of just randomly picking any one of the addresses you lived at for the last 13 years instead of using the current one?!?!?!