The machine is well-oiled by the tears of former middle-class Americans, but you'll notice it doesn't squeek.
With job loss at historic highs, inflation already taking hold, and the credit markets virtually frozen, millions of well-to-do Americans have found themselves in a place they never thought they’d be: collections. But what about the real victims here? The collection agents have a whole new world of people in need of credit repair who don’t understand how to deal with them, leaving many in the booming repo/collection industry wondering what sorts of depravity will best be suited to indoctrinate this newly impoverished class.
“These people don’t know the score,” complained Max Zander, a boiler room leader in his shop. “It’s like they think I’m from a company that sends out written statements or something. I just want a credit card number.”
But many of his clients no longer have credit cards, as he can see while pulling up their information on his terminal.
“These people have no idea what they signed when they bought their boats. They gave Washington Mutual permission to pull their credit report, but their insolvent and gone, so those rights transfer to me. I can see your student loans, what year you bought your house, and when you try to tell me you’re 3-months behind on your $2,000 mortgage, I already know you’re only 2-months behind, and it’s only $1,880… I don’t care what happened to your job, I just have to do mine.”
Newbie up-and-comer Renaldo has been making inroads with his accounts, and may even overtake Zander before the end of the month.
“I just tell everybody I’m going we’re going to sue them tomorrow, and that if they don’t pay me today they better stop driving because they’ll get arrested if they’re stopped for not using the blinker.” He chuckles about his new strategy, but so far it’s been effective, bringing him in literally dozens of dollars per hour in commissions.
“Sure, some people think I don’t have a soul, and they’re allowed to think that, because what I do have is a job, and I’m not behind on my car payments. When people get all mad because they’re lawyers or know the law, I just tell them my name is Max and hang up on them. Forget it, I don’t need those leads, you know?”
The offices of Razon, Marigold & Johnson Associates used to be a real salt mine, but thanks to an influx of newly impecunious debtors, the biggest victim of the economic downturn seems to be human resource director Margaret Ann Hogarth. Her quiet office of just ten modest collectors has swollen to more than thirty, and “half of them are coked-up a-holes,” she explains. “These kids think because they can make $100 in a night that it will get them into heaven somehow.”
Office manager Jimmy J. Johnson, who recently bought a cabin, explained that, “a lot of these new accounts were people that used to be able to pull a line of credit when times got bad, but now it’s just credit cards, and we’re happy to take those around here.”
