He Landed In Debt
I used to work for Qwest, which was bought out by Century Link. A guy bought a no-frills landline for about $10. There was no long distance, no caller ID, nothing. It was just a landline for dial-up internet. He called his ISP from his modem and left it on for an entire month. As it turned out, it was a long-distance number, but he didn’t know. He soon realized what a horrible mistake he’d made.
He ended up with a $25K phone bill. He was an average guy working a regular job who had a tiny home. He had worked the extra ten bucks into his budget so that he could have internet. However, after that, he was drowning. He made two payments of $500 to try and take care of his bill, but he would never be able to pay the whole thing. He called me, begging and even crying, for help.
How the system worked was whoever waived anything took a penalty. It didn’t matter if it was a mistake or legit; waiving anything gave the employee waiving it a penalty, and it was a sales job. Not to mention, that $25K couldn’t be waived by anyone but upper management. I took it to my bosses, but their response was infuriating. Nobody was willing to waive his bill, even though he had already paid a grand towards it.
The fact was that the company wasn’t out anything. The infrastructure was already in place. They would have made a profit on just his paying his monthly bill, but they didn’t care. The way the corporation saw it was that he owed the money, and therefore, no matter how it would destroy his life, he had to pay it back. However, that wasn’t the main motivation.
The company can write off that loss as a loss, and as such, his defaulting on his debt was more valuable.