Mark shares stories from his 12 years as a collection agency lawyer, including the worst name a debtor called him, how collectors are trained, writing the New York State bar exam and sleeping in his office one summer.
Transcript
The worst name I was called
I distinctly remember speaking with one gentleman, and he was very agitated. I'm not sure if it was that he owed the money or if it was a friend or family member, but he called me a pond scum, and for some reason that stuck with me. Now, I've got two ex-wives, so I've been called a lot of names, but I've never, ever been called pond scum. I'm not even sure what pond scum is.
Inside a collection agency
It's very common for large national collection agencies to have a one- or two-week program for individuals who have been hired and have never been a collector before. It's a collector program for new trainees, and typically these training programs will start on a Monday morning at nine o'clock. I can remember one particular week when I was speaking with some of the staff at the collection agency, and some of the new trainees for the collector position had come in Monday morning and never returned after the morning coffee break. So the position of being a collector certainly wasn't for everyone.
I can recall speaking with the collections manager at a national collection agency, and he described himself as running a plantation. I'm not exactly sure what he meant, whether the working conditions weren't very good, but it struck me as odd that he would say that. As for my relationships with the people I worked with, I would say they were professional. Over the years I made friends with some of the individuals I dealt with, and several years after I was no longer a collection agency lawyer, I was invited to the wedding of one of my former colleagues, whom I had known from working at a particular collection agency.
Collecting in Canada and the United States
I was called to the bar in the province of Ontario, so initially I was collecting monies from the residents of Canada. At some point I successfully wrote the New York State bar exam, and after that I was able to collect monies from the residents of the United States. I had one collection agency client that was operating in Canada and wanted to expand into the United States. They wanted lawyers' letters sent out to U.S. residents, and they wanted to be able to accept credit card payments on behalf of their creditor clients. If I successfully wrote the New York State bar exam, that would enable them to indirectly send out lawyers' letters to U.S. residents and accept credit card payments from debtors in the United States.
On my first attempt at the New York State bar exam, I narrowly failed. You have to appreciate that when you're writing it, you are responsible for 10,000 rules of law. I wrote it a second time, and on my second attempt I was successful. They have a ceremony for the people who have passed. Probably 95 percent of them were Americans, but there were a few people from Canada and other countries. Regardless of what citizenship you were, we were all asked to stand and say out loud the oath of allegiance to the United States. That was a kind of surreal experience, there in Albany, New York.
Accepting credit card payments
It's very difficult, if not impossible, for a collection agency to accept credit card payments from debtors on behalf of its clients. The reason is that the credit card companies are concerned that if debtors are paying off their debts using a credit card, the credit card company is going to lose this game of musical chairs and end up being stiffed, because those debtors are going to default on their payments to the credit card company. So if a collection agency applies for merchant status so that it can accept credit card payments, the credit card companies will refuse the application.
One of the collection agencies I worked for encouraged me to apply for merchant status, and when I obtained it, I sent out demand letters on my lawyer's letterhead and one of the payment options I provided to consumers was to make a credit card payment. This was very popular. Once I got called to the New York State bar, I was also accepting credit card payments from the residents of the United States. I did collection work on behalf of collection agencies between 1994 and 2006, and during this period I would have accepted payments from debtors literally in the millions of dollars.
Sleeping in my office
I lived in Guelph, which is about a 90-minute Greyhound or car ride from downtown Toronto, where my office was. Each summer my second wife would take the kids to Europe to visit her parents, so for June and July I would be commuting from Toronto to an empty house in Guelph. One summer I thought, why don't I just stay in Toronto for two months and maybe go home one weekend each month? I found it was incredibly expensive to find a place to stay for two months, so I thought, is there any chance I could sleep in my office?
I took two tall lateral-size filing cabinets. My office was rectangular, so I essentially created a false wall using these two large filing cabinets. Behind them there was a gap about two feet wide and about ten feet long, and I was able to put a sleeping bag there. That's where I would sleep at night. The office was in an office tower on Bloor Street near Bay, and there was a health club on the second floor where I was a member, so in the mornings I would just go to the health club and have a shower. That went on for a couple of months one summer.