When I was growing up I never learned about financial responsibility; as a matter of fact the only thing I learned about money was that we didn’t have any. I got my first job at 15 working at a mall, but when I was 17 I moved out on my own and discovered the wild world of rentals and post office boxes.

At one point in time I worked three jobs to pay the high cost of rent in San Francisco, and at such a young age it was dreadful. I didn’t have any credit cards but my mailbox was never short of a credit card offer or Columbia House CD offers. I usually threw the credit card offers a way, but boy was I a sucker for those get 20-cds-free deals.

You get these thin postcard type deals and you scan through it and check off all the ones you wanted, and well back when people actually still bought CD’s this was the hottest way to get cheap music. I must have done three of these things, and when it came to the wire, I never bought the 6 CD’s you had to buy as part of the deal. — Do that 3 times, thats 18 CD’s at $7 or $9 each; for someone who makes only $7 an hour, those are pretty steep, (but you don’t think of that when you in the middle of picking out all the 20 CD’s you want) Especially since somehow I figured I wasn’t going to have pay for these 6 CD’s. Ghetto youth, I tell you, what was I thinking?
As time went on I found myself barely ever listening to any of those CD’s. There was ever at most 2 or 3 songs that I liked on any CD. After awhile I forgot I even had them. I eventually moved from apartment to apartment, thinking oh yeah, those guys aren’t going to find me. But find me they did. Collection notices started arriving, and that wasn’t so bad because I knew I owed them the money; what was so bad to me was that these invoices were for more than the what I had to agree to pay via buying CD’s. How did this happen? I wrote them a letter refusing to pay what they were asking me. That didn’t stop them from harassing me. Eventually the letters stopped finding me, I did pay them some of what I “owed” back, but years later when I checked my credit report for the first time, boy was I surprised lol. They found me.

From what I’ve heard of Columbia House, they’re still running the same show.