r/tifu•
Marz_Barz

TIFU by leaving an overly aggressive voicemail at a government county office

So I've been dealing with my father's estate since he passed away in November. My brother an I inherited everything including a few houses, so it's been up to us to transfer everything over to our names for these houses including the water bills, etc. Since my father had everything on auto-pay this was a bit of a process and one county in particular has been a bit of a pain in the ass. Their website is atrocious and so I've been dealing with their phone system and leaving many unanswered voicemails with their accounting/billing department over the past few months. Much of the process of closing and opening a new account has been required to be done through the mail with printed forms, etc.

So after working on this and thinking everything was straight with the new account (including the proper forms for auto-pay, etc.) I get a letter in the mail stating they will be taking my father to collections for non payment of a bill. ARGH! I look at the date they will send to collections and it's three days ago. So I call the number on the letter and of course no one picks up and it goes to voice mail.

I proceed to leave a rather stern and worried message about the timing of the payment, when I could pay, etc. and reiterate that I want a call back this time. My brother looks over at me frowning and says "That flattery will get you no where." Little did we know how right he was.

6 hours go by and I get no call back. then all at once BOOM! it's like a bomb went off in my cell phone. Suddenly I am getting swamped by calls from this county from numerous department employees all stating they got my voicemail and want to make sure I get THE RIGHT NUMBER. I litterally am answering one call to explain that I'm not sure why you got my voicemail, as five more calls are coming in and leaving voice mails. My voicemail inbox quickly fills up to the brim with over 40 new messages as the phone continues to ring off the hook!

It seems each and every official government voicemail box for the ENTIRE COUNTY got my message and everyone is trying to be nice enough to tell me I got the wrong number. I'm talking Waste water department, city planning, parks and recreation, POLICE DEPARTMENT, fire department, even the mayor's office called me back. I couldn't answer the phone fast enough and plenty of the folks were laughing with me about the situation. I finally gave up and shut off my phone. As this county is in a different area code I check on the phone through the night and every time I turned it on more calls would come. It is now the next day and this morning still more calls came through though they seemed to have finally ceased.

I have no idea how this one voicemail got sent to every inbox, but my only guess is that it is true karma for having left a bitchy message. Either that or someone heard this message and decided "F this guy, he's going to have a shit rest of the day... click!"

TL;DR I left a pissed off voicemail on the voicemail of what I thought was the county water billing department and my voicemail got sent to every single voicemail box of government officials in the entire county.

So lesson learned, don't be pissy when leaving messages on government voicemails.

Posted Jun 16, 2017, 7:16 PM UTC

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