C S T, Sesame Life
Today’s PEIDM is brought to you by the theme control, the emotion frustration, and the physical state tired.
Its been an odd day overall, but the thing that set me off was a discussion regarding my job. You see I’m a bill collector, if you don’t pay any one of seven different accounts and you’re more than three months past due I call you. I do my best to be nice, but dammit I want money.
One of the things that I’ve been grappling with is the ethics of being a bill collector and in general the ethics of credit cards.
Are credit cards inherently evil? While I can understand the argument that credit cards are evil and I even used to subscribe to it, its like saying every blade is evil, because knives can stab people and as a result can kill people. Scalpels are a blade, but no one would ever think of banning them from the operating room. Likewise knives are a essential item in kitchens. Like words credit cards are only tools, in and of themselves there is nothing inherently good or evil about them. It what people do with them thats evil.
What is frustrating about my job, is people use credit cards to delay making those hard choices. By the time they get to me, the problems have just been compounded and compounded. Instead of trying to clean up just the original problem the credit card account holder and I have at least four if not twelve months of problems to attempt to tackle in one phone call about 20 minutes long, so we’ve got a lot of work to do. But the hardest part about it is dragging their head out of the sand, because they’ll tell you everything they can to keep their head in the sand, so what you’ve gotta do is drag it out of the sand.
Okay but backing up a step. The whole thing that got me started on this is I got well verbally chastised in class for stating “I’m not gonna take food off the table.” Honestly not in a bad way, but at the time I wasn’t a happy camper. I’m sort of learning one of the major things about debt collection is pulling a customer’s head forcibly up out of the sand that its lodged in, because it ain’t gonna get out without any help. You’ve gotta take control of the situation because they’re not going to.
In other news I had to cut Jake lose. Its not something I’m thrilled about doing, but a relationship has to be give and take on both sides.
I honestly feel that I just was giving and giving and giving. Well I got tired of it and I just got exhausted always feeling that his problems were my problems to solve as well. If someone is just going to always put their tail between their legs and run, there isn’t anything I can do about it. I can try, but I can’t always be the one to whip it out from under them and stop them and make them face the problem. I just got so frustrated being the one in the relationship to tell him to grab the bull by the horns. If someone is on a bicycle eventually you have to stop running behind them and just let them ride on their own, even if they’re going to go through a thorn bush. (Trust me, i know, my mom pushed me off when I was bike riding for the first time and I went right into a thorn bush. I’m not doing that again.)
A related entry is Bullfighting Life.
I’m also amazed at how many people will make bad financial decisions.
Honestly this isn’t that hard, you have to bring in more money than you spend. If you spend more that you bring in, then you need to either make more or spend less. Its okay to spend more than you bring in a month or two, but beyond that take care of it.
Another thing that amazes me is people who go for larger payments on essential items even though they’re already having problems with their bills. An example, a friend of mine, who I shall call V, traded in his vehicle that he was paying $152 a month on for a more expensive vehicle that he is paying $350 a month for. Now if he got a raise or something that would be good, but instead he was having issues getting bills to meet before, the extra $200 car payment isn’t going to help anything. Stupid decision, plain and simple, there is no non-emotional way to argue that it was a good decision.
Finally. I’m ready to get going.. I’m a tug boat lashed to shore. I’m waiting to get out there on the open sea and get going again, perhaps I’ll find Jim somewhere…