You don’t have to open up the copy of the ancient history that showed up in the mail yesterday. I assumed it was a medical bill, since the medical/pharmaceutical industry is sending all sorts of pieces of paper with preposterously large numbers on them. They pass almost without comment, and this was fairly modest as those things go. I decided to enter the billing information on my billing partners so I could simply access it with a couple clicks, enter the five or six digit amount, click it again and be done.

I did the usual log-on stuff, found the “new biller” tab and started to enter the data to send them a check. That went smoothly right up to the moment I realized the billing address was mine, the one at Big Pink but the service address was for a place I once owned with my then-spouse Jane.

That was 21 years ago. I have never had a bit of ancient history show up like this. In days since I owed the trash company any monthly service charges was more than two decades ago. In days, that would be 21 times 365, or 7,300 days in which changes could have been made to billing matters. In months, providing a smaller more workable number of 252 individual statements, based on trash pickups are once a week with billing monthly.

We naturally launched an investigation via telephonic and internet means, which lead directly to extended flute solos on the headset waiting for the customer service operators at three separate extensions for approximately an hour and a half.

This was not ancient history to them, and they wanted cash payment for the past due, which goes back to some hospitalization time for the Ex last year. Prior to her demise, the progress of which was a sad unknown to those of us being billed for it.

We presumed she had been paying on the old account without updating the billing information. It woulld have been simpler if she was still alive, but the great sundering of life and non-life baffled the trash company, and we discovered the house had sold in December of last year, right around the time of her demise. That induced a search for public records to see who owned it now, which naturally wound its way through real estate transactions, her former life companion and our older son who is the apparent executor.

That took several more life-layers for which we had been unaware. A call to real estate companies to see if there was a record of who bought the place before getting to the part where we could deliver a copy of the statement and inform whoever is living there now to pay for their own darn trash pickup.

That is where we are this morning upon rising. There were several calls from a variety of Realtors who thought I was selling the house, and we assume those will continue randomly for another few weeks. Or months or years, depending on when real estate agents from as far away as California would be calling to ask if I wanted a decimal point inserted into my asking price. For a home in which we have had no financial interest in a very long time.

All this caused a ramble through ancient history of marriage, property, kids and companions, of which I am a minor and historic-only participant. We will see how this goes as we start another marking point in days or months until this is settled or my credit rating takes a hit for non-payment.

We will see how that all goes. We hope it will not take several thousand days, or hundreds of months to settle things. As a point of reference though, we view this as a sort of time-travel experience, and take no umbrage at anything, except who would be providing an address used for less than a year for billing matters two decades ago. We assume there is a budget shortfall somewhere in this matter and a decision was made to charge it to us.

Ancient history is an amazing place to wander through. If we ever figure out who is doing it, we will kee you posted. And if you ever find yourselves in a similar position, we will have a step by step guide to help you through the hours to a solution, which we think would be several thousand times 24. There was discussion about deducting hours of sleep from the total, since a full third could reasonably be deducted from the total. Added up, though, it is a good chunk of history, now ancient, but still evocative, you know?

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