Promises, promises...

I work in the exciting world of debt collections. I don’t talk about it much, except in comic strip form, because it sucks donkey balls. I’ll go into the sucky bits of it at a later date. However, every now and again, something will come to my attention that collection industry folk take for granted but makes for an interesting case study about the underlying tactics of collections.

When you owe money (and who doesn’t) and are late on paying, they generally outsource to a company who does the collections for them. Sometimes the debt collection company buys the debt from the company that money is owed (student loans, credit cards, medical expenses, anything that’s owed that people can refuse to pay back) out right, under the assumption that they can get the person who owed the $$$ to pay it back better than the original company.

Anywho, I don’t deal with that side of things. I audit the accounts, listening to these collectors on the phones and checking their accounts to make sure no laws are being violated. It’s tedious at best, nauseating at worst. When I first started working there, I thought of a short story where a guy finds a radio with a radio station that tunes into Hell. All it is is people screaming and crying, begging for mercy. That’s what monitoring calls is like. For me, at least. Some people seem to enjoy it, but there are probably also people who might enjoy Hell or at the very least listening to it. (The story turned out not to be as great as it sounded and also was a little too similar to a Kurt Vonnegut short story from Snuffbox for my tastes.)

So this brings me to the funny part. When a collector speaks to you and you say, “Gosh golly, I’ll pay $100 by the end of the month on my late account” this is called a PTP, or a Promise To Pay. They’re not requiring you to send in checks (yet) or put payments on a credit card (yet). They assume that you’ll hold to your promise and pay your bill from now on on-time. Of course when you don’t pay and give them the slip, this is called a ‘Broken’ Promise. This suddenly implies a level of intimacy in the ‘relationship’ of collector-debtor. See before that, you were just that jerk who owed money (and a lot of times they have no problem telling you something to that effect), but then you became friends when you fessed up to owing and ‘promised’ to get back on the straight and narrow. You guys were buddies, hanging out and going for drinks and then that ‘friendship’ went down the tubes when you broke your Promise. You didn’t pay when you said you would.

I love that! I love the implication that the collection industry is now the victim, all because the debtor has broken their promise. I’m not a guy who thinks people with debt are ‘victims’ by any means. Hey, I got debt. Parts of it occurred when I needed something immediately that I didn’t have cash for and couldn’t survive without, like new tires or dental work. That stuff makes sense. It’s a ‘gotta-have’. But not all my debt is that kind of selfless act. Some of it was ‘wanna-haves’ like a Playstation, or some comic books, or fast food. Therefore, if the Four Horsemen of the Debtocalypse come down for me, I’ll know that I deserve the reaming that’s coming my way. But I wouldn’t call the collections industry victims by any means. More like mercenaries.

Anyway, this leads me to the fact that some accounts say ’15 broken promises’ or even more, which says that the collection industry is not only your friend but your friend who you keep screwing over. I thought it’d be funny if there was a chart for all humans that said how many promises you’d broken in your lifetime, as if that was the worst thing you could do to someone. It’s very childlike but simple and pretty in that way. You broke your promise= you are a bad human being. Simple and direct.

We better hope God isn’t a debt collector.