Dangers in the Repo Industry
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For those of us that work or have worked in the repossession industry for years the entire process of the actual repossession just gets so mechanical.
The debtor’s stories and excuses have all been heard. The surprise or lack of surprise that we are there taking their car gets repetitive.
The dirty little secret with those of us earning a living under a perceived cloud of imminent / impending danger is… most people we face daily are good people that don’t pose any threat.
Day after day, pop after pop, the collateral is there and we pick it up. Maybe it is not there and we try to figure out why. But time after time it is business as usual. We do our job. We treat people as professionally as possible. Patience, tolerance, kindness… we hand it out every day. Stern and demanding when we have to… This job is a constant task of reading people, expecting the worse and constantly finding that respect and humility works better than any other tool we have.
Many of us have lived this job half a lifetime and rarely seen the real enemy. There is the type of people out there that can’t be reasoned with. Some of them will not even engage in dialog. Even worse, some will act like a
normal person and after lulling you into dropping your guard a switch flips and the person explodes with no warning. When one of us fall victim to a person of no conscience, to a stone cold killer…. The rest of us are faced with a sobering moment of our own humanity.
When the worst of the worst happens to the best of the best…
When a man with a family, a man known to all to be not only professional but caring and understanding is gunned down in an instant… the rest of us are charged with taking a good long look at our daily policy and willingness to give debtor’s the benefit of the doubt.
When I got over the shock of someone my age… someone married as long as I have been married… someone that owns a business just like mine… getting gunned down like a dog… and for what? Doing his job! Over what? A lousy vehicle! When I got over the chill of the news… I got mad. I was angered out of fear. .. I still hold on to a bit of resentment.
Perhaps I just have the lingering effect of hugging a widow crushed her loss. Maybe the courage of the grown son of the man standing to honor his dad with a eulogy about a hard working provider that he now has to learn to live without… as his words and earnest pain bring grown repo men to tears… still rips at my heart. All of this should have never happened.
But the real problem isn’t the merely the beast that shot him down. He could have just as easily shot the pizza delivery guy. His life is over as a soon to be convicted killer.
The rest of us are stuck carrying on in an industry where the compensation continues to drop… where expectations of service continues to rise… where demands for free keys, storage and contingent work are made without regard for human life. Safety has to come first. Even the professionals in this business have ultimately allowed, mostly out of desperation to survive, the dictates of the clients to continue to grow.
But for a brief point in time… the hearts and lives of business competitors became united. www.RecoveryAgentsBenefitFund.org
I could perhaps provide a copy of this article to every debtor that shows up at my office accusing our agent on not being considerate enough to wait around for them to clean out their vehicle. We all understand how important the sunglasses, umbrellas and dirty snot rags from two years ago are.
It would be a great idea to make an effort to urge extreme caution and moment by moment vigilance to each of you out there.
What I would really like to do is send a message to a good man. A Christian man that was well loved by those close to him, well respected by his peers and a man that will live on in our hearts and minds for the rest of our lifetimes.
God’s speed Will.
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Written in 2011
