When I was a young manager of a small loan office, one of the older, more experienced and more cynical managers described my responsibilities as “chasing debtors for dollars.” That was because we were required to take collection actions against our own overdue customers. Those actions ranged from letters and phone calls to in-person visits. The success of each office was measured by the percent of delinquency to total loan account, and each manager was responsible for his — I knew of no female managers in 1972 — own overdue accounts.
“Collections” were a hated task for me. Going through my delinquent accounts — recorded on large index cards — was a chore. The process was codified in a book called the “General Instructions Manual,” which every aspirant to management status was required to learn. First, write a letter, examples of which were in the GIM; if that did not shake loose a payment, make a phone call: “Hi, this is Mr. Woods from (the finance company), calling about your account. We’ve not received your payment since (date). Perhaps you’ve forgotten?” If that did not produce the desired result, saddle up and ride to the debtor’s house. One of my customers had financed a recliner and was more than 90 days delinquent. I went to the customer’s house to affect collection, with the threat of repossession of the recliner as an option.
I found the man in the recliner, covered in a blanket; he had tubes running into his arms from bottles hanging from an IV pole. He had tubes in his nose, running from a canister of air at the side of his chair. I made embarrassed small talk and asked for no firm arrangement for payment of his debt. I went back to the office and called my district manager and told him that we were never going to be paid, but that I wanted to refer the account for compassionate charge-off. This was a way to remove accounts from active collection status when the customer’s circumstances were so dire as to make pressing them for payment cruel and heartless.
This was one of the few times that I saw compassion demonstrated in the lending business, but I went on to find compassion in the advertising world. When it was clear that I had no one to care for my newborn daughter, my boss gave me a compassionate four weeks of “paternity leave” that I coupled with my two weeks of vacation. When later that daughter was joined by a son and came to live with me in St. Louis, Missouri, I took the two of them to work with me. I had found day care in a federal facility for a brief period, but then Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal facility in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children who were at a day care. From then on, my kids came to work with me, and my direct supervisor turned a blind eye toward her assistant creative director’s office boiling over with the sounds of cooped up kids. One of the vice presidents compassionately offered me the service of her nanny, at her house; my kids were thrilled to spend time with children their age and to swim in a pool whenever they had supervision.
Nina Simone sang, “There’s a new world coming.” The song has religious overtones that I don’t subscribe to, but the music is compelling to me; the song is hopeful that there is coming, “peace … love … (and) joy.” I hope that we enter the year 2021 with a view to demonstrating toward each other, greater compassion.
cjon3acd@att.net