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.

Cleaned out

I used to run my own cleaning business, and my policy was that I’d give anyone a chance at honest employment. This included felons, and for a while, it specifically included an ex-cat burglar.

He was damned handy to have around, too. As the name of his old profession implies, he was agile, and easily on par with 11-year-old Chinese gymnasts.

One of the office buildings on our cleaning schedule had left some pretty strict instructions—we had to clean office 311D no matter what; empty and burn the trash. This was in direct contradiction to the standing instructions; “never ever clean 311D, ever, period.” I called to verify that they wanted us to clean it, and the man who hired me very curtly told me that if he said it, he wanted it done.

But they’d locked the office from the inside, and I didn’t have a copy of that particular key. We had the rest of the building clean, and if the ex-cat burglar hadn’t been there, we’d have just left and I would have dealt with the aftermath of the conflicting instructions later. But the ex-cat burglar was there, and he assured us that we didn’t need a key.

He went up into the ceiling panels like a wisp of devil-smoke, over the door, and let us in. We cleaned, and as requested, disposed of the trash in a very permanent way. Actually, the ex-cat burglar did this.

The police collected me the next day; I had been accused of breaking and entering. They didn’t keep me very long; cops are fairly understanding when they know you’re working for a deranged idiot. I didn’t tell them about the cat burglar on my staff, though. I just said the door hadn’t been locked.

The company hired a different cleaning service, thank effing God. And about a month later, the guy who’d hired me went to prison for embezzling.

The ex-cat burglar quit soon after this; he’d gotten a big pile of reward money for whistle-blowing. Apparently, he hadn’t actually burned that trash. Bastard didn’t even share.