1. "My wife and I are having some marital problems and you know with Christmas right around the corner I have to make sure I buy her something really nice; therefore I haven't paid your invoice and probably will not do so until February!" (Anonymous)

2. "I phoned a customer to ask why we haven't received payments in a while. He said that his bookkeeper is dyslexic and has trouble totaling up the amounts owed to write out the checks for payment!" (Submitted by M. Susan Rohrer, The Beistle Company)

3. "I wasn't able to send you your money because our bank changed tellers and the new girl didn't know how to make deposits." (Submitted by Neekeesha Griffin of Sabic Innovative Plastics)

4. "I have a customer who has 30 day terms, however they pay in 45 days. I called after 45 days to check on the payment only to be told that weekends or holidays don't count in the 45 days calculation ... go figure." (Submitted by Rhonda Bowers of Jen-Cyn Enterprises, Inc.)

5. "Every time I called the debtor, his secretary claimed he was in the Men's Room. Six calls and two weeks later, I told the secretary she'd better check to see if he was still alive!" (Submitted by Peter Moore, DAL, Inc., Clifton Heights, PA)

6. Cheryl Kluczynski of Pacific Corporate & Title Services writes, "When I worked for a paging company I was dealing with one of our resellers who always had an excuse to why he couldn't pay. This one time I had been calling him for several days and when I finally got a hold of him he said he hadn't been able to pay because the roof blew off of his office and his past due invoice from my company and his checkbook seem to have blown out the roof!"

7. Perhaps this customer of John Prather from Diamond Comics can’t handle the truth? Prather writes, “Our client was shocked to hear that his check came back to us as an NSF! He said he still had checks left in his checkbook."

8. Debtor sent in an arm and a leg of a Barbie Doll stating he could not give us cash right now, but "Here is payment since you are charging an arm and a leg." Submitted by (Robert Rowe of The Reybold Group, Bear, DE)

9. Bill Ellinger of Riley Sales Inc. told us recently, "I had a customer go for a couple of weeks without returning any calls. He stopped into the office to make a small payment on his account and I asked him why he doesn't return calls. He said the zero on his cell is broken and since we are in area code 610, he cannot return a call unless he is near a pay phone. He said this is the reason his business is slow and why he didn't have monies to pay on the account. This customer has since been placed with DAL."

10. And so God decided...Sande Fisher of Tyco Electronics Corporation's collection efforts are apparently in the hands of God. If you listen to these debtors, God decides whether you get paid or not! Fisher writes, "I called a customer in Utah about a delinquency and he told me he could not pay because God told him not to. He said if Tyco wants the payment, they should pray for it!!" .......and Fisher writes again, "...from a customer in Colorado. He said he couldn't pay the $500 he owed Tyco because God told him not to pay. He was to give the money to charity instead of us. We never did get the money. I later received a letter from a homeless shelter saying the gentleman contributed the money in our name!"