My mom called today to tell me that they had received a registered letter for us from the Czech Republic. Apparently our bank there has turned us over to collections for a charge that came through on our account several weeks after we closed the account. What the charge was I don't know--I'm still waiting to see the letter itself--but since we stopped using the account a week before we closed it and everything there is done via electronic transfer, I'm not quite sure how they could have accepted a charge on a closed account. Now, please keep in mind that we closed this account in September 2004. Yes, 2004. We got a letter about this issue a few months after we'd returned to the U.S. and I called the bank and dealt with it...so I thought. Now, they have apparently decided that they are really serious about this, which seems to me to be a day late and a koruna short.
This is the same bank--eBanka, if you're curious--that charged a fee for literally every financial step that we took. If money was transfered into our account, there was a fee. If we transfered money out, there was a fee. If we withdrew money from the ATM--even when the ATM belonged to eBanka--there was a fee. If we picked it up in person at the bank, there was a fee. I'm pretty sure that if I had ever required a kleenex while at eBanka they would have charged me a fee, one for each sheet of a two-ply tissue. If indeed something did get inadvertently charged to our account--which seems to me to be unlikely since we had to turn in our ATM cards and electronic PINs when we closed the account--you can damn well bet it didn't come anywhere close to adding up to the amount we paid to them in fees over four years of banking.
It may horrify you to discover that this is not the first time I've been turned over to Czech collections. When we moved to our last flat, our landlord neglected to turn in the papers (yes, there were papers, many of them and in triplicate) to transfer the phone back from us to him. Consequently, we were billed for a month that we didn't use, a month that should have been paid by our scofflaw landlord.
Cesky Telecom kept sending the notices to the old address after our forwarding order had expired (you only get a month of forwarding, and you have to pay for that), and it wasn't until we went to visit our old neighbor lady when I was about 39.275 weeks pregnant that we discovered that we'd been turned over to collections for the princely sum of 324 crowns, at that time about $12.46. You can imagine my mood when I called that collection agent.
In my very best Czech, I tried to explain the situation (this was after repeated calls to the deadbeat landlord) to the rudest man in all the Czech Republic. Hormones raging, I was verging on tears at not being able to express myself perfectly and at his willful refusal to understand me. "YOU are responsible," he kept saying to me. "Because YOU are Nicole Rosenleaf Ritter, are you not? SHE is responsible." Finally I tried the coward's way out, "Do you have someone there I could speak with in English?"
"No, we do not. We are a Czech company and we speak Czech."
Perhaps this exchange is why I always want to punch people who whine that immigrants should learn to speak English.
In the end, I sent Chip off to the post office to pay the stupid 324 crowns. We were going to have a new baby at home and far larger bureaucratic battles to fight.
I find that even as I relate this my blood pressure is rising, and I'm reminded of how challenging life could be there--and not always in a good way. It's necessary to remind myself that as much as we loved our time in Prague, it wasn't just cheap beer and the Charles Bridge. We had these kinds of petty skirmishes every day, partially because that's just how things functioned and partially because we didn't know how to work the system. After a while, we stopped fighting on things that weren't important. We didn't ask about ice for our drinks. We saved the boxes and all original packaging for returns. We learned where not to go.
As beautiful as it was and as much fun as it was, the next battle was always just around the corner in Prague, whether it was with the crabby lady at the pharmacy or the pickpockets on the tram. In that way, living abroad is rather like parenting a toddler, now that I think about it. The rewards are immense, but so are the daily challenges.