When you work as a collector for a company, you're bound to have a lot of wacky stuff happen. So much of it is out of your control, but it seems like the people you're trying to get money from know that they're in control. I've mentioned a couple of incidents when writing about Unimart/Rent City in Denver. But you know there are several other tales of people ditching their responsibilities.
Keep in mind that as I got fired after only three months on the job, I never got closure on some of these cases.
As I said in the earlier post, some people will do and say ANYTHING to get out of paying their regular bill or giving back our merchandise. I called this one account and asked to speak to the customer. The woman who answered said, "Oh, she died. I'm her sister." I then tried to make arrangements to come pick up our merchandise. "Oh, I don't know what she did with all that stuff. I'll have to call you back." Come to find out, she did that all the time. Hild told me he had called her and gotten the same routine from her before. The fact of the matter was that she wasn't really dead. And she did other things that were very suspect. I never saw her come into the store, but the other staff members said she was in a wheelchair. When I went over to the house to see the "sister," she was standing up outside her front door. Then, she sent her caseworker down to see us. We explained that what the customer wanted to do was have us remove her name from the account and put the caseworker's name on it. That would make the caseworker responsible for the payments, while the merchandise sat in her house. That caseworker just walked out of the store.
There was one man we were trying to get the merchandise from. We somehow received a tip that he was at his house. A driver and I went over there and knocked several times. We didn't get any response. We had a walkie-talkie system and told the manager he wasn't home. The manager told us he was definitely in there. The driver started shouting out his name and saying that he needed to give the stuff back. He finally opened the door. He was mad at us, but let us in so we could get the furniture.
There was one account that I couldn't track down for anything. The woman apparently left town. One day, I got a call from someone who told me he knew where the TV she rented from us was. He gave me the address. I went over there on my own. I rang the apartment number on the outside of the building. I was buzzed in. I went to the apartment. It was an older gentleman. He allowed me to come in and look at the TV. He said that our customer had sold him the TV for $50. I looked at the back and determined that it was from our store. I told him it was our property and he was going to need to give us the TV back. He started yelling and screaming that he wasn't going to give it back unless we gave him $50. I communicated this on my walkie-talkie to Hild, who was at the store. The old man was still yelling and screaming while I was talking to Hild about what was going on. Hild said, "Fayd, get out of there RIGHT NOW! We're on the way!" I left the apartment building and waited for him.
When he arrived with a driver and saw me outside, he asked, "What are you doing out here?" "You told me to leave!" "I told you to leave the apartment, not the building! How are we supposed to get back in?" "We'll ring his doorbell and he'll buzz us in!" "I don't think he's going to let us back in!" I rang the doorbell and he buzzed us in. Hild was able to get the man to give us back the TV without us having to pay for it. Hild told him he was in possession of property that had been reported stolen and we could have him arrested. Actually, it wasn't true that we had reported it stolen, but the man didn't know that. We took the TV and went on our way.
A driver and I were sent out to do a collection on a Saturday morning. We went to the woman's house and knocked on the door. After a few minutes, this burly guy opened the door and started yelling at us for waking him up. We told him we were from Unimart. He yelled, "Unimart! We made a payment and dropped it off yesterday! Here's the receipt!" He showed me a receipt from a money order. Apparently, they had dropped the money order off at one of the Unimart wholesale buyer's club locations (which they were permitted to do), and the store forgot to tell us they had received the payment. That means we went out to their house for nothing. After we had cleared that up, our supervisor made us go back and apologize. APOLOGY? THAT WASN'T OUR FAULT! AND THEY WERE LATE EVEN WHEN THEY DROPPED OFF THE PAYMENT! On top of that, she didn't even give us a phone number to her house. I always tried to call her at work, but she always came in after we were gone for the day. I wanted to just walk away and tell the supervisor we apologized, but the driver insisted we go ahead and talk to the man. He accepted the apology. I didn't find this out until later, but the place the woman worked was a strip club. I never got to see what she looked like.
Speaking of problems with people making payments at our wholesale club locations, we had an issue with those employees when they took the payments and wrote out the receipts. At least one of them had a tendency to write the words "Paid in Full" on the receipts. That means that the entire account was paid in full. Somehow, every single customer who got that written on their receipt knew that and wouldn't pay us any more money. Even though they clearly owed more money on the contract, legally speaking, we couldn't collect any more from them and we were forced to write it off. Somehow, those employees never got fired for that (because they worked in a different division of JM Enterprises).
But there is so much more to tell about my experiences. I'll get to those tomorrow.
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