LJ Idol Week 11: What the Body Wants (Open Topic)

[alexmegami]

WARNING: Quite probably triggering descriptions of people doing abusive things to animals and (implicitly) children, and people going through traumatic debt-related situations.

The very first phone call I ever took at That Job was from a woman clear across the country, bawling into the phone.

You see, That Job was with a private mortgage company, primarily lending out on second mortgages at rates I wouldn't take a credit card at. And that was what a lot of these people were doing - consolidating their debts at a somewhat lower rate (probably at best 6% better, but interest only) and tacking it onto their home equity. I guess they were hoping that someday they'd be financially solvent enough to get out of this crisis. A few people were able to get out, or eventually subsume our mortgage into their first. A few people sold their homes, going back to renting to try and get above water.

Rather a lot of people didn't.

That first week was nerve-wracking, but I figured it couldn't be all that bad. I mean, I was just supposed to be a receptionist and data-entry clerk. My job was more or less to screen calls for the people behind the scenes. Surely I could get used to people heaping verbal abuse on me just because the bosses liked to leave at two in the afternoon and never wanted to take phone calls even when they were in?

I started getting sick every morning after the first month. I would wake up, maybe take my shower, and then vomit up some clear bile. Sometimes I didn't even have time to get out of the shower first.

At the time, I thought I had developed an allergy to shellfish (we had had a big dinner at Red Lobster the night before). By April, a month later, it hadn't stopped; I went to the doctor to figure out what the fuck was going on. I was 99% sure I wasn't pregnant, but I endured the blood test anyway. I was rather surprised to see that all my levels were normal, to be honest; my energy was low what felt like all the time. My doctor sent me for a x-ray of my head (a fact that to this day makes me go WTF? - she thought I might have a brain tumor, but wouldn't an MRI have been more appropriate? Whatever, it was an afternoon out of work). I got as far as a gastroscopy in September before the vomiting diminished to a mere queasiness every morning and I figured what the fuck, my body is just messed up. I'll deal.

It's interesting to note that my doctor tried to prescribe me an anti-anxiety medication that also treats nausea, and I swore up and down that I wasn't anxious. I would have given oath in front of God that I wasn't suffering from anxiety. Now I wonder what the fuck I was smoking.

It wasn't all bad: I liked my co-workers and managers when they weren't leaving work three hours early (when they managed to come in at all). But then the other girl that gave me some assistance left, and they didn't hire anyone new. And started implementing more stringent requirements. And then I started getting more responsibilities. Eventually I started taking over most of the responsibilities regarding evictions. By the time I left, I was frequently pulling 9am-8pm shifts with no lunch because I could not get my work done in a regular 9-5 schedule. I think the lawyer once actually got me on the phone at 7pm and was shocked that I was still in the office.

So I say with confidence that short of palliative care, there is no more depressing job than being the one evicting a family.

There are three basic types that you deal with in these cases:

The Scary Fuckers. We had two major cases of this. The first one, I had a guy that looked like a Hell's Angel walk into the reception and start screaming at me at the top of his lungs. Everyone else very quickly shut and locked their doors. I want you to imagine me, a 25 year old girl who weighed at the time maybe 110 pounds (vomiting every morning, remember) up against a 6'2, 300 pound man in leathers. The fact that I did not piss myself is a goddamn miracle. I told him someone would be calling the cops and he left.

He called me later to apologize profusely.

The second one was a certified conspiracy theorist. He was pretty sure the government was out to frame him because he protested their policies (what policies I was never quite sure, but he sent us long screeds about it by fax), and they were using his mortgage to get at him. His house was basically a compound in the middle of fucking nowhere. Let's put it this way: the sheriff knew EXACTLY who I was talking about when I called in that writ, and he asked me if we were really sure we wanted to go through with it.

...The OPP were on hand for that one, and THEY called US to tell them if we received anything threatening from this guy.

...and remember, I was the one that took the mail and answered the phones.

The What The Fuck? Fuckers. One woman, we took over the property but didn't have someone go look at it right away, other than to change the locks. Our lawyer notified us that he'd been notified that there was an "offensive smell" coming from the home that could be scented FROM THE DRIVEWAY and we should probably check it out.

Verdict: Shit-smeared furniture everywhere... and twenty-three dead cats, neatly stacked like dishes in the kitchen cupboards.

Re-read that again and laugh in terrified disbelief. I'll wait.

(That is 100% true, by the way. We had to call in trauma scene cleaners. There was a 10-year-old autistic child living in that house before we evicted his family. We called CPS on that one.)

The Sad Fuckers. There are two that spring immediately to mind here.

The first is the woman who called us, two days before eviction, to beg me. She was five months pregnant and had one young child already. She had hidden the eviction notice from her husband (she didn't say as much, but I gathered she was worried he'd get violent). Her father had disowned her because she had married a black man. She had nowhere to go.

In the end, her father let her move back in. The husband and their dog stayed in a car in the driveway because the father wouldn't let them in the front door.

The second is the one where the sheriff called me and said, "Do you know anything about this guy?"
"Uh... other than he typewrites his letters? No. ...Why?"
"He's 75 years old. I think he has Alzheimers, because I don't think he really understands what's happening to him."

Well, isn't that lovely.

Even better was the fact that he had two cats. The Humane Society couldn't pick them up, because they didn't have enough staff and the guy was in the boonies as it was, but they were willing to lend us two cat carriers so we could transport them to the local shelter.

The guy doing the walkthrough (we learned after the cat lady) decided to just leave the front door open for twenty minutes instead.

I still have no words for that.

The day I gave my two weeks notice, I stopped throwing up every morning. (I still had a panic attack two days before my last day, but that was just the culmination of two years of That Job.) If I'd listened to my body in the first place, I probably could have saved myself two years of heartache and anxiety attacks.

But then I wouldn't have stories with the punchline "twenty-three dead cats stacked like dishes in the kitchen cupboards".