Repo Man - In the Heat of the Night

Previously in my post titled “Repo man – First Blood” I shared one of my stories as a Repo Man during my first two years out of college working for a major Northwest bank. I had been doing this job for several months and had become fairly confident in role as an Outside Collector. Normally the job required me to make contact with delinquent car loan debtors during the day or early evening hours. The tougher cases, where my goal was to repossess the vehicle without customer contact, usually took place under darkness of night during the late evening to early morning hours.

This night was one such case. The debtor had been contacted previously and had not made good on their promise to bring the account current – upon being located, the collateral would be taken on sight. For most of these vehicles the bank had access to the manufacturer’s “key code”. With the code, it was a simple process to have a locksmith make a duplicate set of keys.

This night appeared like it would be just another routine repossession. I cruised the apartment complex were the delinquent debtor lived and quickly located the vehicle. Parking my bank car on the street, I quietly made my way to the collateral, slipped the key into the door, opened it and got in. Now before I would “steal” a car, I would lie down in the driver’s seat so as to not be observed then take a moment to familiarize myself with the controls so I could quickly get away without fumbling. For example, on stick shift vehicles, Reverse would be in different positions on the pattern depending on whether it was an American, Japanese or German car. Once I was ready, I would fire the ignition, throw it into reverse and back out, exit the scene then turn on the headlights when safely away. This had to be done quickly.

Confident I had familiarized myself with the controls, I started the car, sat up, put it in reverse and…. HOOOONNNKKKKK, the horn blared with an incredible noise! Unfortunately, the vehicle had been parked right outside the debtor’s bedroom window – I saw their bedroom light go on as I backed out of their parking space.

Now throwing the shift into drive I turned the vehicle out toward the street. HONK HONKKKK again the horn blared. As I glanced in the rear view mirror I saw the silhouette of the owner looking out the window witnessing their car disappearing into the night.

In preparation as I did prior to any repossession, I had previously located a pay phone booth at a nearby convenience store. I stopped to phone in the repossession report to the local police – they told me owner had already reported that their car had been “stolen”. As I got back into the collateral and gripped the wheel to deliver it to the storage facility, the horn honked again… and continued to honk randomly and unpredictably all the way to the storage lot.

After securing the car safely in storage I realized what had happened. This particular vehicle had been manufactured with a “Rim Blow” horn feature – rather than honking the horn by pressing the center of the steering column, the horn could be honked simply by tightly gripping the steering wheel rim. The idea of the designers at the time was to not have to require a driver to move their hands from the wheel rim to honk the horn. It was a convenience thing. During the tension of my executing the repossession I had been gripping the steering wheel rim tightly enough, causing the horn to honk.

This feature was later abandoned by car manufacturers after it was discovered that a vehicle parked in the hot sun would cause the vinyl in the steering wheel rim to expand, thus setting off the horn. I could imagine hundreds of unoccupied parked cars in Arizona or Texas, their horns blaring away in the heat of Summer sun.

Fortunately, in spite of the blaring horn, I successfully executed the repossession without incident. However, not all repos I did were without confrontation – that story I will save for another time.

Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?

So the stock market is booming, corporate profits are zooming but jobs are still looming and the outlook for the middle class is glooming. The reasons behind the stagnant unemployment outlook has not gone without thorough analysis by we bloggers who, for some reason, seem to have a lot of free time on our hands:

Don’t bother us, we’re busy...

The current theory is that the rich people should not be inconvenienced by the demands of comity because they're the ones who are providing jobs for the rest of us. Those jobs should be kicking in any time now, because we lowered the taxes on the rich people several years ago. There should be so many jobs by now that they're just loitering in gangs, making nuisances of them selves.

Murr Brewster - Murrconomics

... hedging our bets ...

Where are the jobs? Honestly, boards and business owners are holding back because they feel that the current administration chooses winners and losers in the marketplace. Without fully understanding their future costs, or if they will draw the ire of Obama, they find it safer to sit on their cash.

Comments from the Heathen Republican who provided the link: Why Business Isn't Getting In the Game.

... and besides, there's no jobs because there's no customers...

Big American companies are sitting on almost $2 trillion of cash because there aren't enough customers to buy additional goods and services. The only people with money are the richest 10 percent whose stock portfolios have been roaring back to life, but their spending isn't enough to spur much additional hiring.

Robert Reich: The Obama Budget: And Why the Coming Debate Over Spending Cuts Has Nothing to Do With Reviving the Economy

…and, come to think of it, we don’t need any workers anymore either.

…our most admired corporations -- GE, Apple, Hewlett Packard, Intel -- are creating ever more jobs overseas and relatively fewer at home. This has the double benefit of taking advantage of cheap labor abroad and disciplining workers to accept low wages at home. Along with the high unemployment rates have come declining earnings… In 2001, 32 percent of the income of the firms on Standard & Poor's index of the 500 largest publicly traded U.S. companies came from abroad. By 2008, that figure had grown to 48 percent.

Robert Kuttner - Business Doesn't Need American Workers

So even though corporate profits are soaring, that does not translate into jobs for Americans because corporations don’t need Americans any more to either buy their products or even make them any longer and anyway middle and lower class Americans are really nothing more than poker chips for the wealthy to play with.

My own diverging theory is that the Republicans will do anything to prevent the jobs numbers from going up anytime during the Obama administration least he end up getting credit in the public eye for improving the economy prior to the 2012 elections.

Ok, so sometimes I am a cynic when I should be a skeptic. I’m calling your bluff.

~~~

I highly recommend following these blogs:

Murmers – a very well-written humorous blog with topics ranging from the latest poop on the economy to the latest poop on, well, poop.

The Heathen Republican – in a more serious vein; a thoughtful, rational and well-documented perspective of the Republican policy stance.

Robert Reich's Blog - A totally brilliant man, Berkeley professor and Clinton's former Secretary of Labor.

Or if you still perfer the low-brow approach, you certainly can continue to read this blog.

The Vanishing Hope of Jobs

I had lunch with a new acquaintance made recently through the blogging spheres. Like a few of my other friends, he is a former employee of Hewlett Packard in our city. At one time HP employed close to 10,000 people on it’s industrial campus in town; today there are roughly less than 2,000 people remaining.

The photo above is the empty Nypro manufacturing facility, a company that provided services to HP. Nypro shifted the remainder of it’s manufacturing overseas laying off all it’s workers and closed the plant. The empty Nypro building is located along an increasingly desolate row of empty buildings on “Technology Loop” not far from my home where I ride my bike.

The HP campus on the other side of the city is turning into a ghost town as well; many of the buildings are empty and shuttered, a few are leased by other companies as warehouse space.

I heard on the news recently that even companies considered particularly American, such as Cisco, IBM and Sun essentially have little to no domestic manufacturing facilities. Though the “design” may be done here, the manufacture of the actual products is contracted out to companies outside our borders.

Leo Hindery, a former CEO who heads the US Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation, is one of the foremost advocates of a U.S. industrial policy.

"I think you have to start with the premise that a country as big as ours -- the largest of the developed economies -- can't survive with less than 8 percent of its men and women making something,"

According to the latest figures, about 7.6 percent of the workforce is currently engaged in manufacturing.

"It needs to be 20 to 25 percent," Hindery said, "and it needs to be 20 to 25 percent of GDP, otherwise the gap that you have to fill is achieved only through consumer credit." ¹

The country is scratching its collective head puzzling over our “jobless economy”. We have an expectation that things will turn around and be the way they once were; that unemployment will somehow return to 1980’s level. And we demand quick fixes - the Republican machine rode a populist wave into the House of Representatives on the implied promise that Jobs would mystically arise from thin air merely by putting the Conservatives back into power.

But I don’t think the Republicans give a damn whether or now the Great Unwashed have jobs. They care only to be in control of the factors which will direct corporate profits; and profits are no longer dependent on the domestic market any more, their sights are overseas. Indeed, the top few percent whose wealth is based on equities have seen unprecedented growth recently. But where are the jobs for the middle class? The answer is that the wealthy no longer need us as either employees or consumers.

I believe we are waiting for a recovery that is never going to come. Some of the vacant buildings on Technology Loop have now been rented by local governments needing office space. But now Americans graduating from university have almost a better chance of finding jobs outside the country than here at home. “Shanghai and Beijing are becoming new lands of opportunity for recent American college graduates who face unemployment nearing double digits at home.” ²

I have been accused of being depressed about the future of our country; that I lack the optimism that many others do. But optimism must to be based on something more tangible than faith and hope; and in romantic notions that our past reputation as a world leader in innovation will carry us into the future. That was then, this is Now.

Suggested further reading:
"The Real Economic Lesson China Could Teach Us", Robert Reich, January 19, 2011.

References:
1. “Hu's Visit Is Reminder Of One Way China Leaves The U.S. In The Dust”, Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post, January 20, 2011
2. "American Graduates Finding Jobs in China", NY Times, August 10, 2009

Repo Man - First Blood

Fresh out of college with a Biology degree, I was eager to put my “science” to practical experience. However, pickings were slim and I soon reached the acceptance that ANY employer willing to pay me would be greatly appreciated. I accepted employment for a large Pacific Northwest Bank. As it turns out, as a scientist, I was in good company; virtually none of my fellow bank employees had degrees in finance or business – mostly Liberal Arts majors; there was even a guy in the commercial lending department who graduated from seminary. But I digress…

This bank wanted its future loan officers to understand implicitly what a “bad” loan was. Therefore budding young loan officers began their tenure collecting bad debts in “the field”. My entry level position was, therefore, as a “Repo Man”.

This was going to prove to be a tough gig for a shy, 5’ – 6” 145 pound middle class white boy. I was already fairly shy; so much so that I would avoid calling the movie theater to check show times unless I was fairly SURE I would get a recording. My first trial was making it through the interview, which I thought I had blown as the old codger interviewing me never gave me the opportunity to say anything. Miraculously I was hired and soon found myself in “training”. My training constituted riding along for two weeks with another experienced “Outside Collectors”. Once fully trained, I was issued my own vehicle, credit card, assorted Portland road maps and a briefcase full of delinquent accounts.

Here was the game: If the bank (me) could get the collateral back to the car dealership before the delinquency passed the 90-day mark, the car dealer would have to make the delinquent loan good for the Bank. We usually were assigned cases at the point where they were about 60 delays delinquent; previous collection efforts having failed to this point.

So here I am someplace in rural Oregon out on my own my first week on my own. I pull up to the delinquent customer’s house (referred to in repo jargon as “the Flake”). Step one; position your car (door unlocked) facing toward the street in the event one should need to make a hasty escape. There on the front lawn I positively identify “The Collateral”; a bright red Toyota Land Cruiser. Of course this house happens to be situated by itself in the middle of a field, visible for miles in any direction. My reconnaissance reveals that this location is NOT going to be an easy target to sneak up on should I have to return later in the dead of night. Noted.

I knock on the door; a HUGE man steps out the screen door and onto the porch. He’s wearing torn red and black plaid shirt and bib overalls. The stereotype generator in my mind suggests his name might be either “Tiny” or “Bubba”. I am dressed in a sky blue leisure suit.

I launch into my spiel – “…you are two months delinquent on your account, blah blah…ignored notices, blah blah blah.” Then I wrap it all up with my demand “… and if you do not bring this account current, I will be required to take yon vehicle into my possession.”

At the close of my speech – total silence… except for the annoying dog at our feet barking incessantly throughout my entire dialog. Bubba, not wanting his response depreciated by the interrupting dog, draws his leg back then punts the dog into the air and clean off the porch. While the dog is still in flight, he then turns to me and says: “So a little guy like you is going to drive my car away?” Summoning Herculean effort in retaining my composure, I respond: “Yes, sir… I’ll just move the seat forward and drive it off.”

I think the disparity in our body builds mutually suggested that physical combat, at this point, was not warranted. To my relief, he agreed to arrangements whereby he would come into the local branch office the following day and pay up his arrears. I believe I have pulled off a coup.

However, a few days later the branch informs me that Bubba never showed and his account is still delinquent; the guy just blew me off.

By now it’s a Friday afternoon. Having the “key code”, a local locksmith has cut a key for the Toyota. I am at “the Flake’s” place of employment, a manufacturer of railroad freight cars where he is a welder. I cruise up and down the employee parking lot until… there it is, the red Toyota Land Cruiser. I gain access to the vehicle; It is full of fishing gear. He apparently has a big weekend planned.

The engine fires and I slowly drive this guy’s car out of the employee parking lot. Damn, he’s going to be pissed when he gets off work and finds his car gone! I’ve just repossessed my first car. Oddly, my right foot is trembling... it will tremble like that with every car I repo over the next two years.