Credit-card bill blunder pays off

Some days you get the bear. Some days the bear gets you. Last week, I got the bear.

This tale, like most of mine, goes back to the Red Sox. Sorry. It also involves an anonymous credit-card company which recently fled Camden for greener pastures.

In Fort Myers during spring training last spring, this credit-card firm offered cards bearing both the Red Sox logo and a picture of Fenway Park. Plus they offered a free Red Sox T-shirt. Free!

Had to have it.

I got the card (and the T-shirt) then threw it in a bureau drawer with some of my backup cards which are rarely used.

Then last summer, I was hired to shoot a wedding and decided it was time to actually buy a new flash (the old one had done at least 50 weddings) and a new 50 mm lens, all for $300. In what passes for Cobb Manor economics, I thought putting the cost on a virgin card would be a good move. I e-mailed New York, ordered the equipment, then forgot all about it.

I never gave it a thought that the bill had never come in. I figured it was on one of the other five credit cards I insist on having. (If you have five cards with a balance around $2,000 each, that is no where near as bad as having one with a $10,000 balance.)

I forget all about it until I dragged out the deck furniture a few weeks ago. The old patio umbrella looked pretty bleak (like the bozos who fall off my deck each summer would ever notice.) I got back on the computer, e-mailed Hammacher Schlemmer (who else?) and ordered a new “windproof” umbrella with my (almost) virgin Red Sox card. Since the faded umbrella had made several wind-aided, but largely unsuccessful attempts to enter the dining room through the glass atrium door, I thought this was a prudent move.

No, said Hammacher.

No, said Schlemmer.

Both told me that the anonymous credit-card company had refused my purchase. In a fit of pique, I called the company, where an impertinent clerk said I had not paid on the card since the previous September and the account had been turned over to a collection agency.

What?

I replied that I had never paid the card because I never got a bill. He said, that was true, since he noticed that every letter to Cobb Manor had been returned. I asked why the anonymous credit-card company never bothered to call since last September when the letters kept coming back.

He replied that “the balance was so small that we didn’t bother.”

I reminded him that they didn’t “bother” calling me, but had the energy to turn the account over to a collection agency. I had him there. He told me to wait “just a moment.”

While I was seething and planning my revenge on this company (perhaps an angry column), he was off talking to his superiors. It was then and only then that I realized I had applied for the card using my street address, not my P.O. box number. The Camden Post Office will not deliver mail with a street address if you have a box.

When he returned, all meek and mild, he apologized (honest to God) and said the company would remove the complaint to the collection agency, plus would “wipe out” my balance, all $300 or so.

I wished fervently that I had used the Red Sox card for that $80 dinner at Primo’s the previous weekend and maybe some more books from Amazon and maybe a Porsche. But I took what I got and was grateful.

After all, it isn’t every week that you get the bear.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.