(no subject)
I have been reading a lot of Customers_Suck, and Bad_service recently, and am not sure where this really falls, so I’ll post it here. It’s one of my favorite work related stories that I told recently, and I thought I'd share it here.
I used to be an “Accounts Manager” for a rent-to-own furniture company. “Accounts Manager” for a business such as this pretty much equates to “Repo man.” This is one of those places that you make weekly payments on a TV, washing machine, or a couch. We would deliver (so we knew where they lived when we had to pick it up again), and the pick up the equipment when payments weren’t made. It was an awful job dealing with several awful people, both customers and management. Unfortunately, it paid very well. The day I left was one of the best days I ever had.
Anyway, one evening, my friend/co-worker and I were trying to get a washer, dryer, couch and loveseat out of a woman’s house. Policy dictated that once we were in the residence, we were not to leave without the stuff. Besides, when people are yelling and screaming at us because we are taking the stuff they haven’t paid for it makes us want to take it that much more. Every time I stepped up to the washer to disconnect it, the woman in the house would get up in my face and push me away. My partner would distract her and I would begin unhooking it again, only to have her push me away. Now I am pretty laid back much of the time, and I was about to lose my crackers over this person. This went on for about 40 minutes and she finally says, “That’s it, I’m gonna take care of this once and for all…!” and runs into the back room.
Now, we totally thought she was going to go and get a gun and tell us to leave, and we would have. We frequently were put in scenarios such as this, because the rent to own business feeds on low-income families with no credit or are unable to get a loan. The situations tended to get pretty rough, and here we were 2 young guys wearing white shirts and ties coming to take their stuff. It was pretty scary much of the time.
When she comes back, she has a phone in her hand and is shouting that she is going to call out manager to get his “goons” out of the house (we loved being called goons, seriously). We were relieved that she didn’t have a gun to point at us. While she is dialing the number for our store she blurts out, “I can’t believe this. I sleep with your manager every month and he promises to pay for all this stuff. Now he’s sending out you fools to get everything.“ We were dumbfounded, and were openly shocked at her little outburst. When she gets the manager on the phone she says, “Hey [manager], it’s [customer] what’s going on here…?” She then handed the phone over to us and he told us to not worry about repossessing the gear.
One week, and an anonymous phone call later, he was moved out of our store. We later found out that he would use employee bonuses to keep our accounts on track each week, and was sleeping with “several” customers and paying for their gear (also with other managers bonuses).
Boy how I hated that job, but the stories are terrific to this day.
I used to be an “Accounts Manager” for a rent-to-own furniture company. “Accounts Manager” for a business such as this pretty much equates to “Repo man.” This is one of those places that you make weekly payments on a TV, washing machine, or a couch. We would deliver (so we knew where they lived when we had to pick it up again), and the pick up the equipment when payments weren’t made. It was an awful job dealing with several awful people, both customers and management. Unfortunately, it paid very well. The day I left was one of the best days I ever had.
Anyway, one evening, my friend/co-worker and I were trying to get a washer, dryer, couch and loveseat out of a woman’s house. Policy dictated that once we were in the residence, we were not to leave without the stuff. Besides, when people are yelling and screaming at us because we are taking the stuff they haven’t paid for it makes us want to take it that much more. Every time I stepped up to the washer to disconnect it, the woman in the house would get up in my face and push me away. My partner would distract her and I would begin unhooking it again, only to have her push me away. Now I am pretty laid back much of the time, and I was about to lose my crackers over this person. This went on for about 40 minutes and she finally says, “That’s it, I’m gonna take care of this once and for all…!” and runs into the back room.
Now, we totally thought she was going to go and get a gun and tell us to leave, and we would have. We frequently were put in scenarios such as this, because the rent to own business feeds on low-income families with no credit or are unable to get a loan. The situations tended to get pretty rough, and here we were 2 young guys wearing white shirts and ties coming to take their stuff. It was pretty scary much of the time.
When she comes back, she has a phone in her hand and is shouting that she is going to call out manager to get his “goons” out of the house (we loved being called goons, seriously). We were relieved that she didn’t have a gun to point at us. While she is dialing the number for our store she blurts out, “I can’t believe this. I sleep with your manager every month and he promises to pay for all this stuff. Now he’s sending out you fools to get everything.“ We were dumbfounded, and were openly shocked at her little outburst. When she gets the manager on the phone she says, “Hey [manager], it’s [customer] what’s going on here…?” She then handed the phone over to us and he told us to not worry about repossessing the gear.
One week, and an anonymous phone call later, he was moved out of our store. We later found out that he would use employee bonuses to keep our accounts on track each week, and was sleeping with “several” customers and paying for their gear (also with other managers bonuses).
Boy how I hated that job, but the stories are terrific to this day.