Sunday at the office

One of the early stated requirements of the collections job is having to work two four-hour weekend shifts every month. The idea is to not overburden people with working every weekend, but still making a decent number of calls during times when borrowers and relatives are likely to be home.

Saturday hours are fixed at 10am - 2pm for the building. Working west coast accounts, this means I can't call the majority of my borrowers until an hour into my shift, which strikes me as insane and a horrific waste of time.

So I work on Sundays. The building is open for work from 12pm-8pm, and I generally try to work from 1-5 or 12-4. Today was 1-5, a quiet day of just myself, one other collector, and our manager.

One of the other side benefits to working on Sundays is that is the day our client gives us new business. So hundreds of accounts that have never been touched (by us, anyway) show up. Anyone who is there on Sunday can work them, and if you get them into a program, it's yours.

Sundays are kind of hit and miss. On the one hand, they tend to be quiet, since most of the east-coast lines of business prefer to work Saturdays. Sometimes the new business has gems to be converted. Sometimes you get some decent work done. And sometimes you just get yelled at and told you're going to Hell for working on the Lord's Day of Rest.

Collections is one of those areas where people still consider Sunday a sacred day of sorts. People who will go to Wal-Mart after church, call customer service for six or seven different things in the afternoon, or order stuff online are horrified that we have the gall to work on The Lord's Day. And will scream that we are agents of Satan or some sort of thing, and then hang up.

And having grown up in a rarefied time and place, I do remember the idea of Sunday as that day. In Maine in the 80's, stores over a certain square footage couldn't be open, so all you could do was go to the corner store (Nanou's or the tiny little shop just past the railroad tracks that isn't there anymore with the older couple - that's a remembrance for a different essay) and spend a quiet day at home.

Today wasn't horribly exciting - found some places of employment I need to follow up on tomorrow, but didn't actually talk to anyone new. Just got to take a small break in the middle of my shift, and look out over the valley with the melting snow. A day I wish I was doing something else, but weekend days at the office always feel like that.