Logorrhea Or Quietude of the Hams As It Suits Them?

We’d been growing up with the dictum that ‘everything is fair in love and war’; however, in view of our increasingly awesome experience with the phenomenon of digital marketing we urgently need to revise the dictum to ‘everything is fair in love, war and marketing’, for our own solace. I’m not at all exaggerating this. In spite of being very particular about paying all your dues on time all your life and enjoying a healthy credit score as a result your service providers shall not cease to hound you all the time for payment. They’d start at least a week before the approaching payment-due date and their irksome and utterly useless verbosity will flood all your resources of a digital existence. This ‘logorrhea’ of the post-modern times has become a disease like the good old ‘diarrhea’! The disorder cannot be corrected even if you resort to a digital bank transfer system with specific instructions for the payment on the due date. At most of the times the all-encompassing reminders would keep on coming even after making a successful payment. Besides, there’d be the age-defined telemarketing calls even if you’ve been consistently telling (you cannot afford to be too curt or insulting as the callers are mostly ladies) them all the time that ‘I don’t want a personal loan’ or ‘I don’t want a credit card’ or ‘I don’t want an insurance job or a policy’! You finally feel that it’s absolutely sinful to be a good customer enjoying a good credit score. But alas! You just cannot become a defaulter even if you want it desperately enough to have a peaceful and noise-free daily existence.

Then there’s a peculiar phase of an unnatural quietude that seems to blight all of the service providers after they get their payments and this phase never fails to make you restive and edgy. You’d very naturally check the concerned app or account for the confirmation of your payment, of course, after the mandatory wait period. Unfortunately, you’ll not find it for days, and there’ll still be the reminders ‘Pay’ or ‘Recharge’ flashing on your screens which will, naturally again, make you disturbed, and after a series of rigorous navigational efforts from your side may finally take you to the service provider’s rather unwilling admission ‘Oh! It seems you’ve made a payment!’, if you’re lucky. The consequences of ‘making a payment’ in a way which outside of the service provider’s app or recommendations could be even more dangerous and the prolonged quietude that follows would surely make you extremely disturbed.

 

Recently, I made an arrangement with my bank to pay the bills to a particular credit card before the due date which meant I deviated from the method of repayment normally made from the credit card online account itself. The payment was successful as my bank indicated with the debit amount shown correctly. However, the credit card issuer bank never acknowledged it in any manner and kept mum as the due date was approaching ominously. I logged in to the credit card online account to check, and there was no confirmation there either; instead, the reminder ‘payment due’ standing there still. Another fearful thought caught hold of me: if somehow, the payment did not reach the card they’d inevitably charge a hefty late payment amount in my next bill! Therefore, I decided to pay the same amount a second time and paid it from the card account. That payment was immediately acknowledged. I checked the account two days after the due date. And lo! I found the earlier payment recorded in the ‘transactions’ column with the same date that my bank transferred the amount on. Such was the silence of the ham! But how’d they gain with such obnoxious quietude? Why! For that card I’d enjoyed a nice ‘no payment required’ period which I deliberately prolonged; in this case, for them! With my quietude!