Jason's Weblog

While I was doing a three-month term of service in Nicaragua and relying on automatic payments, which had been occurring without fail for two years, to make my payments to Toyota Financial, they made a mistake that temporarily cost me my car and left a deep scar on my credit report for some time. Fourteen weeks after later, the whole mess is finally sorted out. They had applied a bad check to the wrong account–mine. They discovered and reversed their error, but had stopped my automatic payments and didn’t bother to restart them or send me a letter telling me about the goof. We only found out when my roommate and landlord were gotten out of bed in the middle of the night by the noise of a tow truck.

The representative I first spoke with said they tried calling after they realized the error but didn’t have a phone number for me (guess that makes it easy to “try”). I gave that person my phone number, and again when I talked with a manager a few days later. In May I sent them a letter saying I still wasn’t sure they had my phone number and I provided it in writing. Then I called in June to make sure they were going to make my automatic payment happen and the representative said, “Mr. Garber, I’m not showing a phone number on file. Would you mind giving that to me?”

They didn’t send me a letter telling me of the problem, either. The manager, Darien, with whom we argued for a long while to get this resolved said, “Sir, we tried calling and we sent you a letter.” I said, “Darien, I didn’t receive any letter. My girlfriend’s mother has been checking every two weeks and she says nothing’s come. Did you send me a letter?” He responded, “No, sir, we didn’t send a letter.”

Toyota eventually did the right thing, but they sure weren’t nice about it. It took them a long time to see that they had made a mistake and then get all the parts of this huge corporation to work together to return the car and clean up my credit history. One division could clean up one credit flag. They had a phone number, but no mailing address. The credit dispute group had to handle the rest of it. They have an address but won’t give their phone number. I still haven’t heard back on my request for a written apology to the five people who were up half the night on Friday, April 13 when the car was towed and for reimbursement of the $400-some it took to be on the phone from Nicaragua to get it straightened out.

As of today that loan account is closed and it and all my bank accounts have moved to a friendly local bank. The rate is better than Toyota’s, they know me by name, and I know if they were to make a mistake, I’d get a personal visit if I couldn’t be reached. I couldn’t be happier with them.

Update: Though Toyota sent me a letter on 6/28/2007 saying the delinquency indicators and "redeemed repossession" had been removed from my credit report, a periodic check of my credit report on Sept. 1 showed it had not been removed. I had to file a dispute and wait until Oct. 7 to get the results of the dispute. So Experian is clean, but what about the others? Since I spread out my free annual reports from each of the monitoring agencies, I won't know until January and May of 2008.

Also, since I posted this I've gotten some inquiries for contact information or advice on what to do in some situations. It seems lots of people are having similar experiences.

You must write, not call, the Credit Dispute Group at:

Toyota Financial's "customer service" phone number is the one that appears on your statement: (800) 874-8822. Not getting a statement? How convenient for them. Run, don't walk, to http://www.toyotafinancial.com and register yourself for an account so you can request a billing statement and account history as often as you like (which starts to be satisfying if you get one several times a month).

A little Applescript to batch convert xls files to csv:

set theFolder to choose folder with prompt "Choose the folder that contains your Excel files" 
tell application "Finder" to set theFiles to (files of theFolder)
set fileCount to count theFiles
repeat with i from 1 to fileCount
    set fName to text 1 thru -5 of ((name of item i of theFiles) as text)
    if ((name of item i of theFiles) as text) ends with ".xls" then
        set tName to (theFolder as text) & fName & ".csv" 
        tell application "Microsoft Excel" 
            activate
            open (item i of theFiles) as text
            save fName in tName as CSV
            close active workbook without saving
        end tell
    end if
end repeat

dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: _mysql_init
  Referenced from: /usr/local/htcheck/lib/htcheck/libhtmysql-1.2.4.dylib
  Expected in: flat namespace

dyld: Symbol not found: _mysql_init
  Referenced from: /usr/local/htcheck/lib/htcheck/libhtmysql-1.2.4.dylib
  Expected in: flat namespace

Trace/BPT trap

/usr/bin/ld: Undefined symbols:
_compress
_uncompress
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

export EXTRA_LIBS='-lz'
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/htcheck --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql --enable-static --disable-shared
make
sudo make install

post :create, :name => 'Pickaxe', :category => 1, :out_of_print => 0
assert_response :success

get :new
submit_form do |form|
  form['name'] = 'Pickaxe'
  form['category'] = "Programming"
  form['out_of_print'].uncheck
end
assert_response :success

submit_form :name => 'Pickaxe', :category => 'Programming', :out_of_print => false

This is advantageous because it uses the action and method of the form, verifies that the form and the fields you specify are present and not misspelled, and it preserves any hidden or default values that may be in the form, like in form_spam_protection.

Features

• Can select_form by dom_id or url—or call without arguments if there’s only one form
• Specifying a field name that doesn’t exist raises an exception
• Fields that are selects (dropdowns) won’t let you set a value that’s not in its options
• Selects can set using the option label or the option value
• Inspect/verify the options for selects and radio buttons
• Works with RESTful links and forms – :method => :put, :delete…
• Checks for the presence of a submit button when you submit the form
• Works in functional and integration tests
• You can pass #submit a hash and it will update the form accordingly. Submitting a form with new values can be as simple as: select_form.submit {:username => 'bob', :password => 'opensesame'}
• Assert presence of and follow links
• See tests for more goodies!

Installing

./script/plugin install -x http://form-test-helper.googlecode.com/svn/form_test_helper/

Requires EdgeRails or the assert_select plugin

Bugs/Suggestions

You can e-mail me with my first and last initials at this domain or post “issues” on http://code.google.com/p/form-test-helper