Telecheck Nightmare!

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Have you noticed how more and more retail stores are using Telecheck or other services to verify checks before they'll accept them? I can appreciate why they would do this, because it seems like there are a lot of people out there who write bad checks habitually, but let me tell you about this horror story of mine. A few years ago I had checks turned down at Sam's Club, Walmart and JC Penney, even though I have NEVER bounced a check in my whole life. Each time I was given a little slip of paper with a number to call Telecheck to find out why my check was declined, but every time I tried to call them I would get caught in an endless computerized loop and never get to talk to a human being. Although I was annoyed by it, I just pretty much stopped writing checks in retail stores, paying only with cash or check card. In a separate story, I have long since forgotten the PIN number for my check card, so I always use the card as a credit instead of debit. Well, the other day I finished work a little early and had more than an hour before I had to pick up my son from school. I went into a Dollar Tree store and picked up a couple of things I needed and many more that I didn't need but found interesting. Total purchase, $23.98. I had seen a credit card logo on the door (or so I thought), but it turns out that this store only takes debit. They cannot process a credit card unless it's Discover and I don't have that card. I also didn't have any cash. The cashier suggested a check, and I was anxious about it, but I went ahead and wrote a check, and sure enough it was declined with a little slip of paper with a number to call Telecheck. This time I called and actually got through to a human being, who looked up my information and said that my check was declined because of a $264 bad check written to Frederick's of Hollywood in 2002! I have NEVER shopped at a Frederick's of Hollywood store and certainly not in the fall of 2002 when I was nursing my newborn son. And, I have never never bounced a check anyway. The girl on the phone was pretty snippy and kept insinuating that I "must have forgotten" and she gave me a fax number to send a copy of my driver's license and a cancelled check so that they could research it. The more I thought about it after I hung up the call, the madder I got. I ultimately called back and got a different operator, who thankfully was not at all snippy. I told her that I had thought about it since my previous call and that since they were the ones with bad information tied to me I thought it was up to them to show me what they had and why they were holding it against me. She put me on hold for several minutes and came back to say that she was able to pull up a copy of the check itself and it didn't even have my name on it. It must have been some kind of keying error when whoever wrote this bad check was being put into their system. Supposedly it has all been fixed as of end of business yesterday, but I am waiting to receive a letter that she promised me to document that there was something bad tied to me in error and that I am being removed from their bad list. I was very thankful to finally get this handled, and I can appreciate that mistakes can be made, but I am still pretty ticked off about the whole experience. Because of one person transposing numbers and tying me to a bad debt, I have been embarassed in all of those retail stores and virtually unable to write a check in a retail store as a result. Has anyone else ever had anything like this happen? How do you feel about it?? DO tell!