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My cubicle-mate, however, was something special: a former San Francisco detective turned attorney turned alcoholic turned Jesus freak turned debt collector turned relapsed alcoholic turned fired debt collector Round II turned Jesus freak Round II turned debt collector Round III. In addition to mercilessly battering the "deadbeats" and "pieces of shit" whose debts Law Firm & Associates now owned, he kept up a stream-of-consciousness conversation, ostensibly in the hopes of mentoring me as I proceeded down the haphazard highway to true enlightenment.
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And so he rambled, for hours and hours without end, until it gradually dawned on me that I was in the presence of someone who a millennium earlier might have been regarded as a guru or a holy man. If it were 1004 A.D., I could imagine him leading us in prayer at the top of a cliff right before we all jumped off in an attempt to gain enlightenment. Instead, it was 2004, and he was convincing people to pay him money they didn't have for their debts that didn't matter. Together, this lunatic and I were part of the vast mop-up crew of drone workers who took charged-off debts and tried to squeeze as much value out of them as possible. Law Firm & Associates gathered the flotsam and jetsam of the capitalist system's wreckage and we sifted through it in search of a gold doubloon or two.Law Firm & Associates gathered the flotsam and jetsam of the capitalist system's wreckage and we sifted through it in search of a gold doubloon or two.
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- Don't call people after 9 PM local time or before 8 AM (though this was easy to screw up, since we were in the impressively-named Mountain Time Zone).
- Don't call them after they've told you to stop calling.
- Don't continue calling them at work after you've been told by their employer to stop.
- Don't continue talking to them after they've told you they're represented by an attorney.
- Don't misrepresent yourself or your employer, which includes telling the debtor that you're actually an attorney (though it was OK to stretch the truth as far as you can go, as noted earlier) or that you might sue them when you don't actually intend to (which led to some pretty tortured sentences about "potentially taking serious action after thorough consideration of your file and initiating the possibility of commencing a lawsuit").
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