As If Moving Wasn’t Stressful Enough

Several years before we moved in together and got married, my girlfriend had to leave her student flat and moved into a small apartment. The young couple moving out didn’t seem to be the most organised people; however…

When moving into a new place, it isn’t a miracle to still receive mail for the previous tenant, so my girlfriend contacted them and had them pick it up. However, my girlfriend immediately had the feeling something was off. When the girl arrived to pick up the mail, my girlfriend asked whether they had already registered their new address with the municipality, to which the girl more or less replied, “Registering our address? What’s that?” This did not bode well.

How true her feeling was. Although they apparently did change their address in the municipal registration after this, they never did so on almost every account they seemed to had, so mail from insurance, banking, and everything else kept being sent to her address instead of theirs.

Most of it seemed to change after quite some time, except for one. A very famous company, which provides insurance for roadside assistance and traveling, kept sending in letters reminding the guy that he still hadn’t paid his fee. At some point, my girlfriend got worried about the idea of debt collectors showing up at her door, so she decided to call the company and explain that they needed to contact the guy in some other way. 

Obviously, the system of such an organisation is not made to change the contact details of a customer based on the complaint of a third party. What happened afterward, however, was really incredible. Some weeks later, my girlfriend received a phone call from the company, who wanted to speak to the guy about his outstanding fee. Taken by surprise, she stammered, “What? N… No, he doesn’t live here.”

Only after hanging up, did she realise that she had been called on her mobile phone. The only way they could have gotten the number was from her own call. That’s right. She used her mobile phone to call the company and tell them he had moved out of the address and she had moved in, so somebody thought it made sense to put in her phone number as his.

How someone thought this would make sense is beyond me, especially since the rules of the company should actually prevent this from happening. Some random people being messy with contact details is bad enough. Professionals doing it is unacceptable.