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.

She deserved it

At the burger hole I worked at during my undergrad years, there was a period where I was the only bilingual worker. This is the period I like to call “Fuck,” because there was an entire staff of Latinos who only spoke Spanish, management who only spoke English, and mixed customer base. If the management needed to communicate anything to the other employees, or vice versa, it had to go through me.

I regret with all of my heart that I did not abuse this power for the sake of hijinks.

Context: I’m a very, very white third generation Russian. I had no business speaking Spanish. The language just sort of happened to me. (Read: I met a cute guy.)

The computers went down after a storm one day, and the sweetest little old lady came in to buy a hamburger. She was the kind of granny that makes you think there’s a card-carrying division of the elderly certified to bake cookies.

She gave me her order, but since the computers were down, I had to shout it back at the guy on grill. Naturally, I shouted in Spanish.

The sweet little granny leans over the counter with a look of deep concern on her face and whispers to me, “You should be making them speak English!”

I must have looked confused (or, more likely, upset) because she decided she needed to start clarifying for several minutes. The racist shit flowing out of her mouth and into my face made my pulse pick up.

Finally, the guy on the grill (it was the closest position to the cash register) asks (in Spanish) if she’s complaining about the food or something, or if she’s just placing a huge order.

At which point I turn to him, put a finger up to stop the bigoted shit from flowing out of the customer’s mouth, and—well—told him exactly what she was saying, albeit in summary. I don’t feel sorry for what happened. Own what you say, right? And if you say something mean-spirited, well, as they say on TV, thems fightin’ words.

Bottom line; I saw what the guy on grill did to her food, and I saw her eat it.

The Day I Walked Into Hell

Back in 2006, I worked as a nursing assistant in Kansas for an agency that would send me to places that needed extra staff. For the most part, this was a good job. I'd heard horror stories about agency staff, and horror stories about nursing homes, but for four months nothing bad ever happened.

Then I was sent to a state-run nursing home in [redacted]. If you're not a nurse or a nursing assistant, you need some context before you can understand how disgusting what I encountered was, both viscerally and emotionally. Nursing assistants on a day shift, back when I worked, would have 12 patients at a time, which was usually divided additionally among 3 or 4 nurses. Once you got used to it, it was more than a reasonable load. For each of these patients, the nursing assistant is responsible for helping them use the toilet (or preventing / cleaning up messes), bathing them, feeding them, getting their vital signs, helping them move from one place to another, helping them get dressed or undressed, and helping them get up and down out of bed and (usually) into a wheelchair. It's hard work, but most of the nurses and other CNAs I've met, even when we didn't get along, were really good about putting the patients first.

More than 12 patients on a dayshift gets really bad, really fast. Days when I got somewhere to find that I had (for whatever reason) 15 or 16 patients instead were hellish, because it usually meant that there were fewer people to help out. On a night shift, a nursing assistant will usually have more, but since the patients are usually asleep, the work is less intense. The responsibilities beyond keeping the patients clean are usually custodial--keeping the supply room stocked, keeping the linen racks stocked, making sure the laundry is done--each facility is different, and agency aids have to be willing to change job descriptions on a dime.

When I got to the state-run nursing home for my night shift, I had 36 patients. The hallways I was responsible for reeked of feces and urine. No one gave me report--whoever had worked before had left before I'd gotten there, meaning that for God-only-knows how long, 36 patients in a nursing home had had no one helping them.

There was one nurse. She spent the evening watching television and doing paperwork. I spent a 12-hour shift cleaning feces and urine off of immobile human beings non-stop, and when I explained to the nurse that I needed help, she accused me of being "just another lazy agency aide." In other words, I was on my own.

Cleaning shit off of a person is physically and emotionally taxing. The person is usually humiliated, even if they're somewhat used to it, and nine times out of ten, if they can't get out of bed to avoid going all over themselves, they can't move around too well. CNAs usually work in pairs to clean heavier patients; one CNA lifts, the other cleans. I was alone. I was forced to precariously balance the patients against my 120-pound frame and clean both patient and bed one-handed from an awkward position.

About half-way through my shift, tired from lifting people twice my weight and then scrubbing, I went to find the nurse--still "doing paperwork" in front of the television, and tore into her. She tore right back, with this alien conviction that the patient charts she were writing in were somehow more important than the patients themselves.

I don't know or care why she was writing in those charts without actually having gone into the patients' rooms.

I've never been to a nursing home that bad before or since.

When I finished the shift, the secretary at my agency told me I'd been DNR'd--meaning that no matter how bad that nursing home's staff problems got, they'd never use me again.

Thank God.