Let me tell you a story about an ant and a giant cruel aardvark. The ant is me; the aardvark is the local phone company and its computer system.

I’ve recently discovered what it feels like to be helpless against a corporate giant.

May 7, 1994: A phone representative calls me and tries to sell me Caller ID. I tell him I’m moving the next day and ask whether he could transfer my request for a permanent disconnection. No problem.

August 1994: I move into a new place, call the phone company, and tell them I need a new line. No problem.

I receive my complimentary phone book in November and look up my name. Lo and behold, I’m in there twice. My prior address was never disconnected, even though someone new lived there and had a different number. I call the phone company very irate and then began to receive bills for $116.31 for a phone line that didn’t even have a phone hooked into it.

By January of 1995, I became tired of their hounding and gave them their money with a letter explaining the situation and why I thought it was ridiculous that I was paying. The check was refunded. I gave a Homer Simpson cheer and spent the cash. Then I started receiving bills again for $116.31. I call, only to get shuffled from one rep to another.

Oops! We thought you were paying on a different account and had overpaid.

July 1995: My roommates and I haven’t paid our bill in a while. Temporary disconnection. Ok, that’s fair. Since I was moving, I call and ask for permanent disconnection. Instead, they hooked it back up, charging me $60 in the process. Later, I receive a bill on the 17th at my new address saying that if I do not pay $116.31 plus a $60 deposit by the 17th, they were going to charge me even more when I finally get my phone service.

That’s five mistakes in a year and a half.

The phone company says that my request for disconnection in May 1994 isn’t in the computer. The computer is their god, and they trust it to overcome input errors

as well, I guess.

If the computer is a god, why didn’t it know that I

had two phone lines, one of which hadn’t been paid for months? Why wasn’t it disconnected? What good is a large computer database if it cannot tell its servants simple things like that?

Now that $116.31 is in the hands of another aardvark — the Credit Reporting Service. I cannot get a credit card, a loan or a phone until this wad is paid off in full. I’m lucky though. I won’t always be this poor. I can’t imagine what something like this would do to a family living at or below the poverty line. A catch-22 rut spiraling its victims further and further into debt.

A hundred bucks may just be a small puddle. But to an ant, a puddle is an ocean.

Erika Stevenson is a senior in English from Marshalltown.