GRRRRR..................

So I decided to give the old "hey can you lower my interest rate?" tactic a try and it led to one frustrating phone call after another. Here's the backstory...in my last post I referred to one of my cc's as "KILLER". This account went delinquent almost a year ago and was closed & placed with a collection agency in March 2007. Of course, b/c of the delinquency my interest rate shot up to a whopping 30.45%. In the last 7 months I have been on time with all payments, always paid more than the mins, enough so to have brought the account current. So first I call the CC company...they tell me to call the Collection agency. So I call the collection agency and talk to some moron who could hardly understand what he was seeing on the computer in front of him. I ask him about the interest and he says the CC company handles it and I need to call them. NICE, cause they just told me to call you! :) Anyways, while I have him on the phone I ask if there is anything he can do on his end to help me pay things down faster without settling the balance. He said, well if you pay the balance in full you won't get any late fees/over limit fees. So I say, but I'm not late or over the limit...then he backpeddles and says, oh your right b/c your limit is $X and I say, no my limit is $Y. Then I hear a bunch of garbled gibberish as he tries to say something profound, but no actual sentences come out. So I thank him for his time and call the CC company again. this time I get someone on the phone (CS is definitely outsourced overseas) and ask for interest rate options. She says, well we do have a debt management program with a fixed rate of 9%, and yada yada yada. I'm like, sign me up! So she gives me the phone number (which I'm thinking is another department) and I give them a ring. It's a Credit Counciling Service...I talk to the lady there and tell her my situation (Card with a balance around $650 and 30%+ interest) and she flat out tells me that I'm better of not to use the program b/c of how it would affect my credit. Then she says why don't you call the CC company back and ask again. So I do and they say that the only thing they can offer is that debt management program and there's nothing they can do to the interest rate. So I'm going to try and get rid of this thing ASAP, but I'm not sure how other than what I've been doing thus far...just one paycheck at a time.