Here's An Idea. . . Pay Your Bills!

I've touched on this before on my "we'll pay you" post below and at that time I said I could go on forever (and I can) but I would refrain at that time. Well, I can refrain no longer. Working this graveyard shift has certainly brought some interesting calls. At 4 AM each day the system kicks in to shut off people's equipment who are severely past due. Let me note that if you timed it right you could effectively go pretty much 90 days without making a single payment before your services are shut off, but alas I get angry calls each morning about interrupted services. A common call involves an angry person upset at us for cutting off their service because they use their phone/internet for work. Hmmm, you need your phone and/or internet for work yet you don't pay the bill? How about you make that a priority since you need it for work! Are you kidding me? How do people not understand that concept of paying their bills on time, especially those that pertain to continued employment. I certainly understand people who are living paycheck to paycheck and occasionally let the luxury cable bill slip to the point of getting turned off here and there, but those that use the services for work? Unreal. That's like normal commuting workers not paying their car paymentt and letting their car get repoed even though they know they need something to get to work in.

For some reason I'm reminded of my mission and I'll explain why. When I first got out into the mission field, for some reason I had this idea locked in my head that if I wasn' a stellar missionary I would get sent home so I was sickly worried about it. Finally a couple weeks in my buddy Elder Thayne explained to me that the Mission President's purpose is to keep you on a mission, not to send you home. As any RM knows you can actually get away with a TON before getting sent home. You can certainly break mission standard rules; it seems it pretty much comes down to committing a sin that would be a grave sin in normal life, not just a missionary level, to get sent home. Anyways, it was a relief to me at the time that I wasn't going to get sent home but also a disappointment once I saw the level of some of the missionaries in the field (To close out this thought I am obviously a big supporter of the church's "raise the bar" efforts).

Anyways, the mission example reminds me of how I felt about real life when I got home from my mission. For some reason I was terrified that if was ever a single day late on a payment for whatever bill, the company would shut off the service immediately, hammer my credit, charge an exhorbitant fee to start up again, etc. After these years at Comcast, that is clearly not the case, which I can obviously deduct that it is not the case for pretty much anything in life. Not only can you not pay your bill but once it's turned off you can just make a minimum payment and still get away with it. No wonder people are maxed out beyond belief because you can literally stretch yourself so far! I guess I'm happy to know if for some reason I ever need to be late it won't be the end of the world, but also disappointed to see the low standards we have in society.