SvsG: Phone Bills

Staddon vs. Griever: Phone Bills

One of many entanglements between the Plaintiff and the Defendants (or ways in which "our realities [were] very much intertwined", as Bubba put it) was phone bills. There were, at various times, up to four different phone lines at Red House:

• 369-1534
• 549-0474
• 549-0969
• 613-2770

Some of these phone lines were always the responsibility of one party or the other, but some changed hands during the time Defendants and Plaintiffs were working together. At one time, three of the lines were combined -- at Lynne's suggestion and on her initiative -- into a single bill, with the idea of saving money. Unfortunately this made it even more difficult to sort out who was responsible for which charges, as the expenses for each line were not itemized on the bills from the phone company during that time.

To add further confusion, most of the lines were in Nick's name, even for those which Defendants had agreed to take responsibility for paying. (Lynne asked me to continue keeping the lines in my name instead of transferring official ownership to them for reasons which I do not remember clearly, but which had something to do with not wanting her name or Bubba's to be recorded in the phone company's computer records, which in turn had something to do with evading a former spouse who might be trying to track them down. I was also told that said spouse, or whoever it was, was far more likely to break into phone company computers in his search than to hunt for them on the world wide web.)

In order to figure out who was responsible for which phone line(s) at what times, therefore, we have to rely on memory, patterns of behavior, and written discussions (mostly emails).

Nick Notes

To the best of my understanding, by the time we arrive at what I'm viewing as more or less the beginning of the monetary dispute, i.e. when I began formally keeping track of borrowings and lendings between myself and the RDA, i.e. 1999, we had pretty much settled on the following arrangement: 0474 was the Red House line, and all the others belonged to RDA.

Unfortunately, it soon turned out that RDA was in the habit of allowing bill payment to slip until the last possible moment, which often meant that I would receive alarming notices from BellSouth warning that my phone service was about to be cut off. Since I depended on the phone for both calls and Internet, it was absolutely critical that this not be allowed to happen, so I paid such bills immediately whenever I could afford it, and gave RDA notice that they now owed the money to me.

The accounting should tell the rest of the story.