A couple of weeks ago, I got a note from the phone company: "Please pay your past due amount or your keitai service will be terminated on 2/6."
Huh? I checked with Tod, who is in charge of family bill payment, and he said he'd paid them all. The current bill didn't show a past due amount, so I ignored the note.
My keitai was turned off on 2/6.
Of course it turns out there was an unpaid bill buried in Tod's pile of papers. Oops. He paid it at the convenience store on the way to work today and less than 30 minutes later my phone was back on.
I expected a hassle involving a special trip to the NTT office in Shinjuku, a mandatory letter of apology for being a deadbeat, and a fee to turn the service back on followed by a week's delay while they reactivated my account.
But this was as easy as it could be. Thank you, NTT DoCoMo. But next time, could you please put the past due amount on the future bills?
They do, but I don't.
"They do, but I don't."
Wisely.
This almost happened to me once. I rushed to the post office to pay, because it was my idea that every public fee must be payed at public organizations, and then called NTT to beg them not to stop my phone.
"Why didn't you go to combini!" the guy said.
"They have better systems and we get informed at the momnet you have payed."
"Oh? I'll do so, nex time. "I said and being in a friendly mood, we had a little chat after that. A break time for him, may be.
A moment after we said good-by, he called me back.
"Ah, excuse me, mam. I think I forgot to make my work record. What was that you have called me for?"
"But next time, could you please put the past due amount on the future bills?"
I was first going to comment asking if this might be a cultural thing, like perhaps over there they do not think that massive and continuos personal debt is a natural state of being, as we seem to here in the US.
Then I read a couple of recent articles talking about personal bankruptcies in Japan being at record levels and on the increase, so maybe that's it instead.
Or, maybe a bit of both, since the Japanese per-capita level is still less than ours. *shrug*