I'm going to start off this post the way I have started some others because some of the things I blog about come up from time to time, not to say rear their ugly heads, so I sometimes refer to previous posts. If you are a frequent reader you will know to whom (or what) I am referring when I say the Unholy Triumvirate. We have lots of telecom providers in Canada, but Canadians prefer either Bell, Rogers, or Telus. Roughly 86-90% of telecom revenue is sucked in by these three totally corrupt corporations. There ARE dozens of other providers, but they lease lines from the big three so, yes Virginia, that IS a monopoly. They cheat, lie, and steal like a monopoly and we allow them to. They are massive contributors to what I call "the cult of inconvenience" and in the post bearing that title I mention Korean telecom providers who are horrible, but MUCH better than the Unholy Triumvirate.
Here's a blogpost from Feb. of 2024 called "How is Telus Like The Hotel California?." Please read it. It won't take long. One of my shorter ones. The answer is that you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Note in this post that I wrote, "I really do not have a credit rating." To give you some context I was living in Calgary back then working part time at the Centre for Newcomers, living with Rob and Terri, and doing my 10th course in my master's degree (still believing it was legit). I had been told by a landlord in Trail where I lived the summer before, that I had no credit rating. He was a banker and did credit checks all the time and in 2023 when I got hooked up with Telus and moved into my own place in Trail, I had no credit rating. I signed up for Telus internet so that I could do my 8th or 9th course of my master's' degree. I forget which one. This was while working as a security guard for Teck.
When I moved out and tried to cancel my Telus and was blocked from doing so, I started getting emails that I could not answer and bills that I could not pay from Telus for the ensuing months after I had moved out of my apartment AND given back the internet box. Here's a blogpost from that time explaining this experience in more detail. Some time after that I guess Telus wanted to appear like they had done their due diligence in getting me to pay what I did not owe them for service they did not give me and they gave my account to a collector who threatened to mess up my credit rating.
So today I got a text from a guy who is taking care of renting an apartment for a Chinese lady here in Sarnia. It's a cheap basement apartment that's right between the two sites where I work security and right beside the school where I volunteer. It would be perfect for me! But Ben, the guy representing the landlady, said he had done a credit check on me. I told him I didn't think I had a credit score but I also mentioned there had been some trouble with Telus so that might give me one. He said I have a very low credit score. He also said that I owe something like $550.
Now... The 550 dollars has to be mostly interest on the one or two months of cable I didn't get and didn't pay for. I can't remember what I paid back then but I don't think it was even 100 bucks a month. I had nothing but internet, no TV and no phone. That amount happens to be the exact monthly rent on the apartment I'm trying to get. So, after 59 years of life I owe 550 bucks. That shouldn't result in a bad credit score really. And I don't really owe that much.
The landlady will be getting first and last month's rent - if I don't pay and take off, she's lost nothing. Unless I trash the place and I dunno, there might be a damage deposit too. Also, during my interview with Ben I told him that I have over 20 years of teaching experience and 10 years of security work. People trust me with their kids. I have to get regular criminal record and vulnerable sector checks for the teaching. I also had heightened security clearance for some of my security work. Shouldn't that have more weight than a bad credit score or a 550 buck debt? He told me that they've had a lot of people contact them about the room and I have two things going for me that the others didn't: I'm employed and I'm not a whackjob. I also explained that I had tried to pay Telus but couldn't. If they don't give me the apartment because of this, that would be insane.
But let's look at this closer because it falls into the category I've been pursuing in these pages lately. We just follow stupid rules without thinking. Let's examine a Canadian credit check and see if it's a good indicator of honesty and/or something that would indicate whether a person would be a good tenant or not. First of all who does it? You might think they're done by some government agency but they are not. In Canada either Equifax or TransUnion does your credit check and they are private, for profit businesses. These two credit reporting agencies gather data reported by lenders like banks, credit card companies, auto loan providers, and utility companies. All are paragons of virtue and stellar examples of institutions that would NEVER report anything fraudulent EVER! And if they DID provide what's known in the business world as IKYABWAI credit reports (I know you are but what am I) in which THEY cheat the customer but claim the customer has cheated them, SURELY Equifax and TransUnion would check it out, no? Absolutely not! The citizen has to do that through their online dispute portal or mail-in or call-in services. But we can't/won't do that until we know our credit has been fucked up and by then it might be too late. And let's face it, those dispute services are probably designed with the very same dedication to the cult of inconvenience as the Telus cancellation services that don't fucking exist.
Equifax and TransUnion do not verify the data they receive from lenders or creditors, they just rely on these notoriously unreliable entities to report everything honestly. Errors and mismatched scores occur frequently as you might expect. But having said all of this, it's still a valuable source of information for landlords because they receive information about delinquent renters, right? Wrong. They only lower renters' credit scores if they are reported as delinquent by third-party rent reporting services such as FrontLobby, Zenbase, or TenantPay. For most of us, Equifax and TransUnion have none of our rent history data at all. Yet 82-90% of landlords nowadays do credit checks on prospective tenants. Why? Cuz it's just a rule. It's what we do.
I'm not going to get too deep into the Blue Jay game the other night in which the STUPIDEST thing I have seen in sport happened. Here's a pretty factual (but not even close to GOOD) explanation of it. The game was delayed for what seemed longer than 15 minutes. Fans and players were upset. We STILL don't have a valid rule or explanation. The fact that he ran home on a fly ball without tagging up is a rule that supersedes this fake rule that everybody is trying to claim exists. I dunno if the umpire Guccioni is the son and heir of the Penthouse Bob Guccioni fortune, or maybe has ties to the mob but you can't go home on a fly ball without tagging up. Most people in the ball park know that rule. It seems that even when we know we've done something stupid the go-to move is to double down on the stupidity and everybody is just far too inclined to go with it. Change the rule. Or eliminate it. If the ball had been caught, both runners tagged, and the guy on first got tagged out, not forced out, trying to advance to second AFTER the guy on third had made it home, THEN it would be a timing play and the run would count.
Anyway, what do you think the odds would be of getting my credit rating restored if I managed to find someone at Equifax or TransUnion who gave half a hunk of shit and explained my whole story? They would KNOW FOR A FACT that I was right and they are wrong but what do you want to bet they'd be mealy mouthing and making themselves look stupid defending the established but stupid rule of believing the company and not the customer?
Before I go, I want to add to this that I had been on the phone, after trying so many different ways to reach someone to help me cancel my Telus internet, I got a girl on the phone who said she was at a Telus office and said she could help me. I told her that I was trying to cancel and I couldn't and I kept getting email saying I owed for internet I wasn't getting. She said she'd open up my account on her computer. So I gave my name and account number and she assured me that I had a zero balance. That is, my internet was cancelled and I owed Telus no more money. But I kept receiving emails and messages that I couldn't respond to even after that! Do you suppose Equifax or TransUnion would even believe that? And what do you want to bet I end up having to pay that $550 someday when it has ballooned even more. And can somebody please tell me why they are allowed to charge interest? If I really DID get a month of service without paying then I owe them that much forever. Maybe indexed for inflation but interest? This is just something we allow because they are a monopoly and we can't stop them!
So anyway, I want to move into this apartment but I might lose it for having a bad credit score that was generated by dishonesty that was in no part my own. It may be believed by Ben or the landlady because we believe for-profit businesses before honest people nowadays and for some reason we evaluate prospective tenants based in part on a credit score that in all likelihood bears exactly no connection to past tenant performance on the part of the renter. But that is the world in which we live. Those are the rules. It is what it is. Right?
