I Hate Dealing with Stupid People

My cousin Elizabeth is visiting here from Jacksonville, Florida and we've been hanging out for a couple of days. This morning I took her to her mom's, Aunt Anne's, and came back home to start baking stuff for the various Christmas parties (okay, 2) I will be attending.

When I came in the door the phone was ringing, so I answered it, thinking it might be Lynn or someone else worth talking to. Instead, a stuttering female voice asks to speak to Sondra and then she pronounces my last name wrong. I corrected her, since I didn't know if it was a business call or what, and then she indroduced herself. I'll call her Sally.

Sally is the daughter of the woman who used to own this house. She was the one handling the sale of the home for her mother. She was a total pain in the ass. No one was living here at the time, and we had moved up from Florida in a desperate attempt to outrun hurricane Dennis, and we stayed with my Dad until the sale on the house closed. Anyway, she made everything difficult, from getting access to the home to making herself available for us to contact her. My Dad didn't really have any room at his house, and we had so much stuff, that I decided to ask her if we could take up a little room in the house we were buying and store some stuff in there. She said she would think about it. (This house was pretty much empty except for the living room, which contained a chair and some sewing items. ) I understood that, and, a week later, she called to tell us we could move our things in under a few conditions. One, we were to only use two rooms. (Why, I don't know.) Two, we absolutely could not move in until the first of August. Three, it would cost us a hundred dollars.

The first two conditions ticked me off slightly but the third one sent me through the roof. My Dad called her a "rotten bitch." My nephew Ricky started bitching about people on "power trips." I just didn't understand it. Part of my problem is, I don't realize that most people don't think like I do. See, if I had been Sally, and was getting CASH for a house, I would be at least a little bit accomodating. If I had been her, and I saw two young people who shoved everything they own into a 17 foot UHaul truck and two cars, with a child, and outran a hurricane in order to save everything they had, I would not have a problem letting them put some stuff in the house. What would it hurt? No one was living there and we would have had enough sense to put everything in one or two rooms anyway. That is how I would have handled it. I just live my life by the law that if you do right by people, people will do right by you. Sometimes they don't, but there's karma, also. And I just feel better when I do nice things for people who need it. I would have never charged anyone a hundred dollars to stack boxes into a room of a house that they are buying with CASH anyway. That's why I don't get it.

So, pissed off but having no choice, I wrote the check. Our only other alternative was to put our stuff in storage for three weeks, and then rent a UHaul and do it all over again when it came time to move in here. Ugh. So, I wrote the check out to Sally, dated July 16th, for $100 and in the memo area I wrote, "storage fees paid in full," just in case this shady, greedy bitch tried anything else. The check was hand delivered to her, and two weeks later, we moved in.

I wrote the check off of my account in Florida, because, obviously, that was the only account I had at the time and I explained that to her. She had no problem with it. I went on with my life. The account was closed, and I opened a new, local account.

Today, the phone rings, and it's Sally. She tells me she's calling because, well, "you know the check you wrote me for storage fees?" I said, "Yes," in a cheery tone. "Well, uh, I just wanted to, uh, let you know that I, uh, never cashed it, uh, because I was afraid it wouldn't be good anymore. Because it was an out of state check. And I figured you'd open a new account" Now, at this point, I feel my blood begin to simmer. See, because I am a sharp cookie, and in a blinding flash of anger and reality, I realize what has happened here. But I let her go on. "So, the reason why I was calling was because, uh, I was wondering if you could send me out, uh, a new local check by the end of the year, if that would be convenient for you." Stunned, shocked, and completely disbelieving, I used the oldest excuse in the book: I told her I would have to discuss it with my husband and that I would get back to her. In truth, I don't have to discuss anything with him because everyone around here knows that all major decisions fall on me. But I couldn't very well say, "fuck you," and hang up, could I? Or maybe I should have?

In any case, I know what the deal is. I am not fucking stupid. That dumb bitch forgot about that check, or held on to that check for so long, that she decides now is a good time to try to collect on it because it's Christmas time. And she could probably use that $100. The absolute nerve. Before I even gave her that check, I informed her that it was an out of state check, but that the account was in good standing and she would have no trouble cashing or depositing it. She said she had no problem with an out of state check, as long as it was good. I assured her that it was. So we had an entire conversation about this check being written off of my Pensacola account and it was totally fine with her. Now she calls me up saying she was "afraid" to cash it because it "might not be good anymore"? That is unacceptable.

So now, I don't know what to do. My instinct tells me to just fuck it off, but my conscience tells me I agreed to pay her a hundred dollars, so I should just pay the hundred dollars. The problem is, I don't have it right now. This bitch doesn't know that I am a full time student and my husband is working, and what he makes is barely enough to clear the bills. I didn't explain it to her because it is none of her business. It just seems odd to me that she's calling me four months later. Why didn't she call me in August? September? October, even? Why now? Because it's Christmas and she wants the money. I just don't know what do, so any advice would be helpful.