i am who i am – who am i?
it’s been a weird week – i’ve had two seperate ‘mistaken identities’ this week, and they’re both random as hell.
the first one happened on tuesday, when i received a letter from sallie mae (the student loan consolidators.) this letter said that i owed them over three thousand dollars and that i hadn’t made a payment since feburary 2004. the letter also said that if i didnt pay up, they’d be turning me over to a collections agency and damaging my credit report.
the part of this that’s messed up is that i don’t have a loan through them, have never dealt with them, and as far as i could tell, there was no reason for my name and address to be in their database. then i noticed that the letter was addressed to ‘brian c. jenkins,’ which needless to say, is NOT my name. so i called them and they asked a bunch of question to try and identify me (do you live at this address, were you enrolled in college, do you have student loans, etc.) i answered yes to all of the questions and started to have a sinking feeling that it was going to be a serious pain in the ass clearing this up, until they asked if i’d ever been enrolled at lindenwood college, which i had NOT.
so finally they realize that i’m not who they’re looking for, and explain to me that they obtained my name through skip tracing trying to find brian c. jenkins that used to live at a similar address. he skipped town on his student loans, the fucking bum.
the other reason that i knew this was bullshit was the phonenumber. they had my personal line listed as my phonenumber – it’s the number that’s in the phonebook for me – but i dont have that number listed on any of my credit cards, loans, schools, employers, ANYWHERE – just in the phonebook. so when i saw that number, i knew it was crap.
so finally they agreed to send me a letter with my name and social on it showing that i’m not who they are looking for, i don’t owe them any money, and i’m not in their database as an existing customer.
the letter has yet to arrive.
i’ll have to continue with saturday’s mistaken id later on, lunch is about up.