Canadutch
I haven’t really been in much of a bloggy mood lately, probably because there hasn’t been a lot to talk about… or maybe there has and I’ve just not been arsed to sit down and write it all out. Either way, I’m still alive and I haven’t been informing anyone about it.
One interesting thing happened not long ago, last weekend actually. We got a call from a credit card company asking if we’d tried to activate credit cards lately. We, of course, said no.. because we’re not in the habit of getting credit cards and spending money we don’t have. The reason they were calling was because someone was trying to activate credit cards in our name, and failing. What happened was, this company we dealt with years ago was sending us this credit card. Another letter was sent as well with the activation code. The two items were sent from different departments, one which did get our change of address five years ago, and the other didn’t. Lucky for us, the letter with the activation code came here.
When we first moved to this apartment we’d been living here about a year when we decided we wanted to get a clothes dryer. We called up Wehkamp, which is like the Dutch version of Sears, and asked if they could send us a catalogue. When we gave them our info they informed us that we owed them 900 bucks. We had no idea what they were talking about and told them so, but they insisted that we had ordered almost 1000 guilders worth of merchandise from them. We explained that we’ve never shopped from them, hence us asking for a catalogue.. because we didn’t HAVE one. When they told us the items were all sent to our old address, it all started making sense.
Apparently Wekhamp had sent out their usual “Hey come shop from us” crap to our old apartment and it had our info on there somehow. The people who moved into our place after we moved out used our information to order things from there and had been doing so for a year without us knowing. We managed to sort it all out with Wehkamp and weren’t expected to pay anything and we also went to the police who were as useless as tits on a bull, like always.
We forgot about it all until this January when we were buying our house and were told we had credit issues. The dumbasses at Wehkamp didn’t do as they said they would and remove the flag that was put on us for not paying the money that we supposedly owed to them. It was fixed quickly and we moved on past it again…
SO, that brings us back to last Saturday when we got this phone call. Five years later and the dirtbags who moved into our old apartment were still up to their old tricks. Thank god this company took the effort to call us and question the attempts to activate the card, otherwise we may have never known. What bothered me was, we know what they did five years ago and we know what they tried to do now… what did we miss in between? What have they done that we dont know about yet? I was furious!!
We called the police and .. surprise surprise!! Nothing they could do! The people only attempted to activate cards in our name.. so according to the police they hadn’t done anything wrong. I guess stupid criminals who can’t manage to get their crimes done right don’t count! I brewed and brewed and brewed and couldn’t stand it anymore.. the police weren’t helping us, the companies they were frauding couldn’t do anything about it, so what could we do?
I decided to find out more about these people. Xander looked up our old address to find a phone number and we were going to have our neighbour Wendy phone and pretend to be doing a survey. I wanted to know how long they’ve been living there, so I’d know if it was indeed the same person. If they had kids because maybe they had a teenager who was doing this that they didn’t know. It turned out that their number was disconnected and we couldn’t get through.
Finally we had enough and I couldn’t stand the thought of these people getting away with what they were doing. If the police weren’t going to help than we had to help ourselves. The only problem was that our old apartment was in a really bad neighbourhood, so we had no idea what kind of characters might be living there. I didn’t want to end up face to face with some big african woman… or worse, Xander to end up facing a crowd of Turkish thugs or something.
That’s when I realized that having a hoodlum for a neighbour wasn’t so bad. Our upstairs neighbour is a bit (ok a lot) of a badass and runs with a pretty rough crowd. It’s always been something we sort of turned our nose up at and didn’t like but it came in handy last weekend. When we went upstairs he and another thug friend were hanging around and after telling them what was going on they were more than happy to drive us to our old place.
After an exciting drive with some slight road rage between our neighbour and some Turkish guy in a van, we arrived back in the hood at our old apartment. (Groepstraat 45A, Rotterdam, in case any dutchies out there are reading this and feel like sending our little fraudulent friend a bag of flaming dogshit) A woman answered the door who I’d peg at anywhere between 45-55, rotten teeeth and just all around crackwhore-nasty.
When we questioned her about what was going on she denied it. Sadly she’s about as adept in lying as she is in brushing her teeth because none of us believed it for a second. We didn’t get hostile with her but we did ask what was going on.. she said that there were people staying with her last week and it was them, when we asked for names she said she didn’t know that they were just acquaintances. We told her to tell her “friends” that we’ve spoken to the police and they are aware of what’s going on, but if we ever get another call like this we’ll be making an issue of it .. but it won’t be through the police. Which was an easy threat to carry off with our friends standing behind us.
She looked nervous and a bit worried so hopefully this is the last of it. It irritates me so much that they have gotten away with it this long and that the police have been so incredibly useless in this situation. In their defence though, they’ve been useless in every situation we’ve been in with them.
So yeah, that bit of thuggery is the biggest news I have at the moment. Otherwise we’re just working on the house (slowly) and doing our thing. I still haven’t been back to school and am pretty sure I’m not going to be returning other than to do whatever tests are required. The classes served the purpose I went there for, to get me past my nervousness of speaking the language… the rest I can do on my own.
Oh yeah yesterday we bought a hutch for the diningroom, which is our biggest purchase so far in our house renovations. You can see a pic of it here on the bottom right. The big cabinet with the glass doors on top. The bottom part has lots of room for us to put things we need a place for and the top will be great for things that I haven’t been able to put on display here for fear of the cats knocking it down. We have a beautiful Waterford crystal bowl we got as a wedding present that has been in the box for five years, because I’ve been afraid of it getting broken. I also have dishes coming over from back home that were left to me by my grandmother, also a beautiful set of silverware that my nana gave me over the years growing up.. which is now a full set. Anyway, it will be here on Monday so I’ll be sure to have some nice pics of it once it’s up in the diningroom.
Going from the 19th – 26th on a petsitting gig in Den Hague. I’ll be spending the week with Gus and Ike who are my 2nd and 3rd favorite dogs in the world (After Bailey of course). This will probably be the last time I get to see them since their owners are moving back to the US because their work contract has ended. Anyhow, it’ll kind of suck being away from my boys for so long but I can’t pass up the money that a week there will make me. So don’t be surprised if I message you all bugging because I’m lonely!
Oh … and that means an entire week without my game… *Shakes*
