What the eleven words are for

Tanaka Print on J Street had one telephone, black, on the wall behind the counter, and my father answered it the same way for forty years: the name of the shop, and nothing after it. On the first of every month he was also a man who made calls. A print shop extends credit whether it means to or not. The wedding invitations go out before the check clears, and a church bulletin runs for a quarter on a promise. So on the first he sat on the stool with the sage ledger open and called everyone who was more than thirty days behind.

In 1991 a woman who owed him for a funeral's programs asked him to stop. She said it once, quietly, on the second call. He stopped. He sent her one letter a month instead, the same three lines each time, and she paid in full the following April, in an envelope with a card in it. He kept the card in the ledger.

I have been thinking about her this week, because of eleven words.

An advertisement is going around that sells a sentence: "Please cease and desist all calls and contact with me, immediately." It is offered as a loophole buried in a law from 1970. Calvin has the rule: the right is real, it comes from a law passed in 1977, and in writing it does roughly what my father's customer did with her voice, which is end the conversation. Tomás has the case of a woman who said the words in March and opened her door to a process server in September.

What the advertisement understands, better than most of the honest material on this subject, is the desire. Nobody wants the sentence for its own sake. You want the phone to be quiet. You want to stop flinching at a number you don't recognize while you're at work, to turn the phone face down at dinner and leave it there through dessert, to get through one week without rehearsing what you will say if it rings. That is a reasonable thing to want, and the law agrees with you. You can have the quiet for the price of a certified letter.

What the advertisement leaves out is that the quiet and the debt are different things, and that the people who sell the first as if it were the second are counting on you not to notice until the season has turned and the envelope that finally arrives is from a court. The account is still there. So is the balance, and the right to sue over it, and the line on your file.

The phone going quiet only means the conversation has moved somewhere you can't hear it.

My father's customer understood that, I think, better than the advertisement does. She asked for the quiet so she could think. She opened his letters. She paid when she could, in the order she chose, and it took her eight months. The quiet was not her ending. It was the room she needed to decide in.

So decide something with it. Before you send the eleven words, find out three things. Whether the amount is right, because if it is not and the collector's first letter is less than thirty days old, the letter you want is a validation request under § 1692g, and Calvin has it. Whether anything you've received carries a date from a court, because that date does not care what you have said to anyone. And whether you want the quiet to think, or to stop thinking. If it is to think, write the letter.

If you send it, keep the green card. Then put the next envelope from them on the kitchen table, unopened if you need it to be, and open it on Saturday morning with the coffee, the statement, and a pen beside you.