Lisha Cassibo has been writing for the Uxbridge Cosmos for two years, both as a freelancer and as a columnist. She has also written for several parenting magazines both here in Canada and for English publications in Switzerland. She graduated from Carleton University with an honours degree in Journalism and English Literature. She lives with her family in Sunderland.
A rant for the Little Guy
I have had enough. I’m fed up, I’m ticked off, and I’m tired of it all. Your first thought may be that I am writing to complain about the never-ending sea of white that lies outside our front doors, and while it, too, is wearing thin, there isn’t a farthing I can do about the snow. There is, however, lots I can do about my “beef.” You see, I’m tired of being “the little guy”. The tiny person that seems to be at the mercy of every big corporation, the hard-working citizen whose money ends up in someone else’s hands. Ladies and gentlemen, I think it’s time we stopped getting shoved around and stood up for ourselves.
Indulge me, reader, by letting me have my rant and then seeing if you don’t agree with me at the end.
I spent this past weekend with my stomach in knots and my appetite on hold as I fretted and stewed about a phone call I had received on Friday night. A call from a certain large telephone company that shall remain nameless saying that, unless I ponied up an amount of money that was more than my monthly mortgage payment, I would lose all my services come Monday. I spent my Friday night printing out old bills, combing through pages and pages of numbers, and finally realized that said company had made an error sometime late last summer, and that this error was costing me and my texting fingers a lot of cash. Not only had they made that particular error, but they had neglected to transfer other billing information when we “bundled” everything to give ourselves more “savings” - ha ha. When they did finally decide to transfer this information, combined with their other error, the results were staggering, and so was our phone bill. So I prepared myself for battle.
I felt like David going up against Goliath. Little me was going to have to undoubtedly fight, and fight hard, for an error that I didn’t make, to be fixed. I wasn’t happy. And it got me thinking – in how many circumstances in our lives are we being jerked around by those who only see us as numbers and dollar figures?
A certain electric company comes to mind – why, in heaven’s name, is every person who receives a bill from this company made to pay a “debt retirement charge” to the tune of almost $30 a month? Why should we have to pay down the debt of the “former Ontario Hydro”? My debts are paid when I pay my bills – it’s not my problem now! I have my own debts to pay, not Ontario Hydro’s! It’s ludicrous. Yet do any of us have the gumption, the bravado, the proverbial cojones, as it were, to stand up and say “You know, I’ll happily pay my bill, except for this $28.30, here, which isn’t really my worry.” Bet you if we all did that, someone might actually listen, and things would change. But we don’t. We just let ourselves be taken advantage of over and over again.
The people of Egypt have finally decided, after 30 years of a dictatorship regime, that enough is enough, and they let themselves be heard. And won. A precarious win, true, but a win nonetheless. Is that what we are headed towards? Maybe not next year or the year after that, but I’m beginning to think it’s not far off.
It’s not really like me to go on about things like this, but this phone bill just pushed me to the edge, and then right over it. I finally got through to a real person on Monday morning, and had my case all ready to present (was having fanciful thoughts of becoming a finance lawyer, I was so prepared). I spoke briefly to a girl named Tiffany, who informed me that she couldn’t help me because their system was down. It was everything I could do not to quip “What happened, did you not pay your bill?” I didn’t think it would further my case, much. I actually ended up taking time off of work later in the day to spend time on the phone waiting to speak to a real person.
Here is where I concede that, after many minutes on hold and a few supervisors later, said large phone company offered to credit my account to an amount that exceeded the amount I was ready to dig in my heels over and refuse to pay. I was suitably impressed. I wasn’t 100% satisfied, however, as they staunchly refused to budge on the other issue that I had (what do you mean you can not bill me for three months in a row, then suddenly spring ‘em all on me at once?!), but I felt I had already scored a minor coup, I wasn’t going to push it. Yet now, I kick myself. I should have pushed it. We all should push it. Push back harder, and more, and stop letting other people put our money in their pockets.
Well, I feel better after this little rant. Thank you, and maybe, just maybe, think about me and my rant the next time you get a bill or something that just makes you shake your head and reach into your pocket.
Enough is enough.
