THE MAIL MAN RINGS TWICE

I once had a lovely client that decided that she wanted to punish her soon to be ex-husband. He had always prized his high credit rating while berating her for her poor decisions in the past that had left her with a puny rating. She decided that the best revenge would be to hit him where it hurts.
Among many other petty schemes was this little gem. She decided that since she was moving out of the marital residence she needed to file a change of address. Of course she had been married for so long that it was just natural for her to put both her name and her husband’s name on the official change of address form. How was she to know that the post office would assume that both had moved and forward all of their mail to her P.O. Box? (What she should have known is how seriously the Post Master General considers mail fraud, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)
Now you would think that her husband would have grown suspicious when the only thing appearing in his mailbox was junk mail but I suppose years of having a stay at home wife who took care of retrieving and sorting the mail had an effect. It was roughly three months before the first collection calls started.
Of course he didn’t get any of these calls. You see in addition to changing the mailing address my client had cancelled the parties’ cell phones forcing her husband to take out a new phone contract in just his name with a new number. His creditors were unable to contact him by mail or phone.
Now at this point you would have to assume that this man must be an idiot. He wasn’t getting statements, but he should have known things like the utilities and the mortgage needed to be paid each month. In his defense it must be pointed out that many of his bills were normally automatically deducted from the parties joint bank account and that he was not aware that his wife had shut off the automatic debts before leaving and was going in once a month to remove money from the account so that the balance seemed to go down as it should without the bills actually being paid. What about the bills that were not directly paid by his bank? Shouldn’t he have known that they weren’t being paid? Well, you would think that, but like many people I talk to he needed the physical reminder of a mailed bill each month or he forgot about it. To add to the problem he was under a significant amount of stress due to his wife’s machinations. In the end it took four months before he realized that the bills weren’t being paid and took steps to deal with the problem.
He made a few calls on his new cell phone. He tried to make as many payments as he could. Of course the monthly withdrawals from his account by his wife had sapped his resources so he couldn’t pay everyone but he could start trying. He then went to the post office to correct his address. Then he made a few more calls. One of those was to his wife. He made his accusations and told her how much trouble she was in. She promptly went back down to the post office and filled out a new change of address card once again redirecting his mail and the process started all over again. Over the course of the next year she changed his mailing address at least six times that I know of and is probably still doing it to this day, despite being threatened by officials with the post office and the judge handling her divorce.