By the books

This is all anonymous, right?

Ok. So. I work in collections for [removed], which handles some pretty big clients. I’ll admit to, on occasion, resorting to various levels of bastardry to get someone to pay up. But only when I know they’ve got the money. I’ve got problems going after people who clearly can’t pay up, and that’s part of the reason I’ve never really gone anywhere in this company. I do my job. I do it well. I still have some residual soul, you know?

We’ve got these sheets what tell us how, exactly, to treat people. My call quality has never been rated under 95. That’s partly because I stick to the script, even to the point where I talk over the client. In doubt? Follow the goddamn sheet. Guy won’t pay? Follow the script. Guy pays? Follow the script. It gets the paperwork where it needs to go and keeps the spice flowing, or whatever the hell makes collection call centers stop themselves from falling into the goddamn hellmouth.

So this guy calls one day and says he wants to make a payment. Which is fantastic, except he’d been calling us at the end of the month, just before we send collections to go out to legal (where they blossom into lawsuits) and promising to pay for almost two years. Legally, there isn’t shit I can do. Or anyone, really. Anti-harassment laws keep this man perfectly safe from me, because I follow the script.

You know that disclaimer about our calls being monitored? They’re occasionally monitored in real time. So when this guy—let us call it Captain Bozo—went to lie to us about paying him and I started following THE SACRED AND HOLY SCRIPT, my super’s voice exploded over the line.

I’ve heard cussing. I’ve heard cussing from sailors; it doesn’t hold a candle to what garbage men come up with, and neither one matches the filth that daycare workers spew. My super topped them all. He started with Captain Bozo’s rumphole, worked his way up and down three unrelated pantheons, and then tied everything together with a metaphor involve prostitutes and trains. He did this all with four-letter words. I took notes, lest it all be lost forever. There’s cussing, and then there is art mimicking beauty. This was the latter, only on cocaine and acid.

But Captain Bozo, deep down, he’s my soul mate. He hangs up. An hour later, my super is sent home. Captain Bozo calls back. Gets me. I followed my script. He followed his. I’d be shocked witless if he’s ever paid a bill.

At least I didn't have to adopt it

I’m a teller at a bank whose name you know, and our branch gets heavy foot traffic. A couple came in one time, fighting full on about their bills. And I mean fighting; they got so loud and hateful at one another that our security guy had to go ask them to keep it under fifty decibels. They came up to me, withdrew a large chunk of money—a dollar shy of emptying their account— and then left. There were people behind them, and I didn’t notice until that line thinned out that they’d left their baby carrier, complete with a sleeping child, on the counter where we served coffee.

I, the security guy, and the manager all concluded that the baby belonged to the couple that had been fighting, but we were at a complete loss about what to do. The security guy wanted to call social services, but the manager didn’t want to lose the parents’ business. When the number on their account turned out to be dead, she said we should give the parents time to realize they’d made a mistake.

I was all for that, and genuinely impressed that my usually harsh-around-the-edges manager had something resembling a soft spot. Until I mentioned that the couple had taken out most of their money, leaving a token dollar in it so that they didn’t have to deal with closing it.

The police and social services showed up about ten minutes later. I never saw the parents again.