Dear Bell Canada,
Thank you for your invoice for $4.22 on the final payment on my late father’s telephone bill.
I do apologize for missing your bill due date, automatically generated by your crack billing department, by 72 hours. I guess my only excuse is that I was busy cleaning out my father’s effects to be on top of your deadline. While I did manage to close out his account over the phone (and thank you for trying to keep his account open while I was talking to your rep) and I did pay the outstanding balance in full, albeit a couple days late, I hope that you can forgive me for not promptly paying this huge bill of $4.22. I just figured your 84% profit increase (somewhere over a billion dollars! Bravo!) for 2009 would distract you from this $4.22 I owed you, but apparently you need it much more than I thought.
I do hope you can put the $4.22 to good use. I hope that my contribution to your corporation, in my late father’s name, can enrich your company to new levels of customer service. With this money, may I suggest you hire someone to actually monitor what your utterly heartless billing department computers are doing when faced with estate handling? I’m assuming it was an utterly heartless computer since no human would actually ask for $4.22 from a dead man. Oh sure, I’d understand $50 or something higher, but for a billion dollar company to ask for $4.22 because a bill was 3 days late seems to me like no human with any kind of soul attached to it, would let this be sent out by mail. Twice. If I’m wrong, then I bet if Bell Canada was an actual physical human body, they’d be the guy in the back of the hall, eating from the buffet, muttering how cheap the tuna fish finger sandwiches, crusts removed, are.
With all this being said and speculated on, I will state here, that if an electromagnetic pulse were to go off over all the other Communications companies here in Canada, effectively wiping them off the business map, and for some miracle, yours was the only infrastructure left for internet/telecommunications/cable provisions, I would rather cut my own liver out with the paper edge of your god damned $4.22 bill, and serve it to a room full of starving cats than give you one more dime.
With warmest fuck yous.
Dead Robot
Update: a mystery cheque has arrived!
An interesting synchronicity is occurring between art and real life: The movie The 