Boy, I Feel Foolish

I paid a bill to Christie Clinic via online banking in December. A couple weeks later I received the uncashed check back from Christie with a typed note that it was a duplicate payment and that I didn’t owe anything. I don’t really know how this happened because according to my records it did not look like I had previously paid for this particular appointment.

I hung on to all of this, and this week when I received a bill for an appointment in January, I decided to take the uncashed check in and ask if I could use it. The check was valid for 180 days, until the end of June.

Initially the cashier said “yes.” Then she turned the check over (which I had not done), and it was stamped as if endorsed, and there was a hand-drawn X across the stamp. I showed her the note explaining why the check had been returned to me. She said I would need to talk to someone elsewhere. I said I did not want to take the time to do that -- it was approaching noon and I had a couple other places I needed to go -- so I said I’d just pay by credit card.

After I left it occurred to me that the cashier probably thought I was scamming the system: that I had a canceled check and was trying to reuse it. The letter explaining the returned check was not on Christie letterhead and probably just looked like something that I had typed up.

I almost wish I’d gone ahead and talked to the other person she wanted me to see. But I simply didn’t want to spend who-knows how much more time when I could just pay the bill and be done with it.

Lesson learned.