Brigitte

I know Brigitte doesn't particularly like being mentioned on this blog, but I sometimes have to.

Have you ever been overcharged for some service and sat there meekly and paid for it? I used to do it all the time. I mean, I CAN get angry on the phone but I can't be Brigitte. She used to manage whole apartment buildings, so she knows a lot about idiot bureaucracy.

She tackles these motherfuckers like a pitbull. For some reason, our telephone bill had jumped by roughly 1,000%. Only because I was calling my ex-wife in Japan on her cell phone, as opposed to her landline. Of course, it was always official business, when was I coming to pick up my son, blah blah blah, but Bell Canada neglected to inform us that if we called Japan on her CELL phone, the price would skyrocket from six cents a minute to 39 cents a minute.

As I had to arrange complicated schedules of when I would be picking up my son, I ended up calling quite a lot. A trip to Japan can't be done off the cuff.

So what do you do when you suddenly get a phone bill for $240 as opposed to the usual $60?

Call Brigitte. She flat out refuses to pay it. As I speak she's still on the phone with them. But she'll iron them out.

Then there's the bureaucracy in this building in which I live. I get newspapers delivered to my door on weekends. But if I don't pick them up fast enough, like, after an hour that they're delivered, I get a formal letter of complaint.

But it's good to know that Brigitte is on the case. I'm a milquetoast. But she reduces bureaucrats to gibbering wrecks. You should be so lucky.