This morning I found a reminder to pay an invoice between my other mail. I remembered the original invoice was from January, now we are end of May, so three months later. They had been kind and patient with waiting until now.  I was not forgotten to pay the first invoice. The fact is that it was sent by a law firm. A firm I did not know and never had done business with. The explanation on the original invoice was vague, so I thought in January that it was probably some kind of mistake. Or worse some shadowy trick from a lawyer I had never met, in order to deceive me hoping that I would pay for a service I did not remember anymore.

In January I put the original invoice aside, didn’t look at it anymore, and forgot it completely.  Until today, the day I received the reminder.  So I thought, there must have been SOMETHING, SOME service they have delivered, but there was nothing I could think of. So finally I decided to call them. And to ask them why they were sending me invoices for services I could not remember.

I got a secretary on the line and I explained the issue to her. She asked me, ‘and why didn’t you call us to ask for an explanation in January‘.  I hadn’t seen that one coming. Yeah, ummm, she had a point, I had not done that, so certain I was that it was some kind of mistake or worse. So I told her that, that I thought it was a mistake because I had never done business with them. I didn’t tell her my other thought, that of the shadowy trick. But my words were already enough to get her altered. She said, ‘if you thought it was a mistake you should have called us EARLIER, in January. An invoice is an invoice’.

Her voice sounded irritated at that point. No idea what she was thinking.  Or what had happened to her earlier today that she was reacting this way. That was not very customer friendly.

I wanted to reply something ugly but I didn’t, just limited myself to ‘but I’m asking it NOW, and I REALLY would like to know what it is about’.  I heard her typing on the computer and then ‘it was for a service that came from XXX’. What the heck, I thought, that’s my accountant. What was going on here. I said ‘yeah he is my accountant but he never mentioned something about your office’. That WAS true, I had still no idea what it was about.

She couldn’t tell me more, so she said, probably tired of me and the situation, that she was going to ask the lawyer that had handled the case to call me back. I said that was okay and thank you, and that was that.

Now I’m angry with the accountant, because he obviously forgot to inform me that he did something with a lawyer I am supposed to pay for, and I am annoyed with that secretary who seems to think that I have to pay invoices when they arrive at my doormat, no matter whether I know or not what it is about. Because ‘an invoice is an invoice’.

I ate three bars of chocolate, to get rid of my own frustration and irritation. Which is not a good thing to do, less when you have the age that you cannot eat three bars of chocolate anymore without being punished with at least 2 pounds extra.  But I didn’ t care at that moment, and I enjoyed every piece of it.