The Kid calls me a bunny rabbit, and as loathe as I am to admit it, it’s kind of true.  My default setting is to trust. 

My mom will correctly size up a stranger in mere seconds.  It likely comes from being a Jersey girl.  The Kid is a probably much healthier combo of both world views.  But despite protestations of massive amounts of street cred, my sweet child falls much more on the bunny rabbit side of the scale.

Actually, rabbits are probably much more suspicious of people than even my mom.  Have you ever met a bunny in a grocery store and exchanged not only chicken recipes but life stories?  Most of the time the mere sight of you in the frozen food aisle is enough to send them fleeing in terror.  There is very little love and trust for humans on old Watership Down.

But I would much rather live my life leading with my heart and assume that everyone around me is good, and true, and full of the milk of human kindness.

Except.

Except for when it comes to my money.

Then, Gentle Reader, I make Sherlock Holmes look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm on ecstasy.  Every penny that leaves my hand has been run through a rigorous series of checks and double checks.  If you send me a bill or ask for money, you’d better have an airtight case, or you ain’t getting a penny.  You’d have a much better chance of getting a kidney out of me (literally; I’ve offered a kidney more than once to dialysis patients).

You’ve got to deserve my money and play fair.

When my cable goes out, I always call and request a credit for the time I had no service.  The other day one of their representatives said, “It’s not worth you calling us for this outage.  It only comes to sixty-three cents.”

Um, excuse me Miss Spectrum.  When you’re paying my bill, you get to decide that.  But right now, I’m responsible for it, and yes, I want every darn penny of that sixty-three cents.

When we bought our house, I had only lived with my parents, then with Petey in a tiny little mobile home park, and an apartment.  I’d never lived anywhere where I was responsible for a monthly water bill. 

One day, about eighteen months after we’d moved in, I got my first water bill.

For $1300!

The city informed me, when I called in the midst of a financially provoked stroke, that they’d neglected to bill us since we’d moved in, so what I was holding in my trembling hand was for the entire time we’d lived there.

Yeah…nope.

As I politely explained and kept politely explaining over a week-long conversation, I had openly called the city to turn on our water.  My mail box is right in front of our house.  The house is not hidden behind a bush, we were right there, out in the open, using water, every day.  This was 100% on them, and I was not paying.  But they were free to start sending me a monthly bill with new charges, and I’d be delighted to pay it.

I won.

So, if you’re having a dispute with your credit card company, or you think you may have won a trip to the Bahamas from a contest you never entered, or you’re thinking about ordering a brand-new, authentic, Vera Wang wedding dress online for $40, give me a call.

‘Cause you might be all starry eyed and gullible, but I’m a bunny rabbit.

 A bunny rabbit that’ll take you out.

Thanks for your time.

Contact debbie at d@bullcity.mom.