This letter refers to "Double Check" from Parshas Vayetzei,
about checking bills. Mrs. Sherlock Home-Phone...
Dear Editor,
First let me thank Rosally Saltsman for this and all of her
other delightful, helpful articles. Keep up the good work!
Now to the bills: The day I read her article on keeping tabs
on all your accounts, I also received my cell phone bill, so
I conscientiously checked it. I discovered a mysterious
charge of 55 shekel for violating my contract of "60 extra
minutes a month on condition that no Shabbos calls are
made." They claimed I had made a call three months before
but when they sent me the time, date and number to which the
call was made, I had to laugh. On any other Shabbos, I might
have suspected that some grandchild had played with my
phone. But what showed up was Shabbos Shuva at 4:04 p.m. I
distinctly remember wanting to go to the local Shabbos Shuva
drosha but overslept. So no one came into my room to
play with the phone.
I had programmed my phone to automatically divert to my home
answering machine whenever my cell phone is turned off. So I
asked the phone company representative whether it could be
that someone had called my cell phone (hopefully some baby
or a goy) and the charge for 19 seconds airtime
was for the divert to my home phone. The phone
representative thought that this was plausible and referred
my claim to her superiors who called back to say that on a
one-time-only basis they could cancel the fine but would
hold me responsible for future diverts on Shabbos!
So beware! One more thing to remember before Shabbos: to
cancel diverts!
I would like to take this opportunity to highly recommend
the use of an answering machine in preference to Bezek's
Voice Mail (ta koli). First of all, you can use a
machine to screen calls even when you're in the house: e.g.
you're busy, maybe giving supper to the kids, but if you
hear an urgent message, you can pick it up and talk before
they hang up. Secondly, you don't have to sit there, hold
the receiver and punch buttons to retrieve messages. [Ed.
How lazy or busy have we gotten: when dialing became too
difficult, we were given buttons to punch. Now buttons are
too much of a strain?] When I come home, I access the
messages and listen while I do other things and decide whom
I must call back first. And once you've invested in the
machine, there are no monthly charges. [Your editor would
like to put in a GOOD word for the Super-Voice-Mail service
of Bezek -- ta koli plus -- whereby you need not lose
incoming calls while you are on the phone, and need not
(rudely) interrupt them to go back and forth from one caller
to the other.]
And now, I have another horrific story to prove that bill
checking pays: when I used to check my bank statements, I
basically wanted to know if any checks were outstanding or
if all my deposits had been credited. My utilities were duly
noted as paid or not, but not against the exact bill. That
is, my gas was usually around X per bill, my electricity Y,
and if something similar showed up on the bank statement, I
was satisfied.
Suddenly, one statement had the tail end of one month plus
the beginning of the next and surprisingly, there were TWO
charges for electricity. We are supposed to get billed once
every two months. Both approximately my Y amount, but when I
took out my electric bills, I discovered to my great horror
that for the past EIGHT bills I had been paying someone
else's bills PLUS my own on alternating months. I was
so upset that I had overlooked this for so long that I was
too embarrased to make more of a fuss with the bank about
their mistake.
I just wonder how that someone felt when he suddenly had to
pay eight bills at once! If HE had been checking HIS
accounts, he would have avoided that...
I have tried to pay more attention ever since, but when "the
world is too much with us", other priorities take
precedence.
Thank you, Rosally Saltsman, for the timing of your article,
just on the day when a bug creeped into my bill.
In admiration,
R. Friedman
EITZES
A reader from Rosh Ha'ayin: I read in Bayit Ne'eman
about cleaning eyeglasses. Well, I've discovered the BEST
way and challenge anyone to top it. An Israeli neighbor of
mine once taught me that the best way to clean WINDOWS is
with newspaper. One wet, crumpled up sheet, then one to dry
and polish.
Well, this works for eyeglasses, too.
SEEING IS BELIEVING. Try it!
