Homeless Woman Part II

So when we last left the bill collectors were circling. These were not just any old bill collectors, these were collectors for student loans.

I said Melissa is around 40. I think she’s actually older. She had a birthday and she told everyone she was 38. Allen commented that she must be older because he was 36 and he couldn’t remember some of the events she talked about. She had mentioned college in the eighties and he was thinking about when he graduated from high school and Melissa would need to be a good bit older in order to be enrolled in college in 1984 unless she started early. Melissa never mentioned graduating from high school, so it is possible that she dropped out, got her GED, and then immediately enrolled at the Cow College on the Plains. (She says she went to the same school I did but she might have just been talking shit) But still, the years aren’t adding up.

Anyway, Melissa never paid off her student loans. She owed over $100,000. I don’t know if the interest really racked up over the years or if she accepted the biggest loan offered but I can tell you that if I owed that much money I’d have a PhD to show for it. Melissa never finished college. I don’t know why she quit. She told me that she declared bankruptcy and the judge made a special exception for her and allowed the student loans to be in the bankruptcy. Normally this isn’t done because then everybody would go to school for free and then declare bankruptcy upon graduation. Melissa claims the judge felt sorry for her because she was a ward of the state and there was no way she’d ever be able to pay back the loans. Then she said her lawyer didn’t file the paperwork correctly so she got stuck with the loans anyway. I don’t believe it. The lawyer would have to follow the court orders and even if it did happen that way she could have fought it. I think the truth is she wanted the loans to be included and they weren’t so she decided to ignore them.

Because that’s what she did when the phone calls started. When she bought the car the dealer ran her credit and those loans came up. Now the collectors had her contact information and they called her cell until she turned it off. Then they called the lab and every day Allen, me, Hattie, and a few times Slutty Girl took the calls and relayed the messages to Melissa who was belligerent and rude when we handed her Post-It notes. On the rare occasions that she did answer the phone the student loan people would tell her to just pay something, anything, even $20 a week, or they would have to garnish her wages. And she would scream and cuss and slam the phone down. Then she’d tell one of us that she wasn’t paying anything so they could go on and garnish her wages if that’s what they wanted to do. I don’t think Melissa understood what garnishment was. I tried to tell her that if she had a garnishment on her wages she WOULD be paying and she stomped off angrily.

It took a long time for the garnishment to go though because there’s a complicated process to follow where the collector has to establish that the person actually owes the money and they really work for the company and then earnings have to be figured up and the collectors can only take a certain percentage and I think the company has to agree to it. Hattie told me that when she was just starting out she had lots of credit cards and she wound up in trouble with two garnishments. The plant manager called her in his office and told her if she got a third one he would have no choice but to fire her. So based on what Hattie told me I think companies can be held liable in some way because if several collection agencies are taking your pay then you basically become like slave labor. I don’t know for sure, I’m just speculating. I didn’t want to embarrass Hattie by asking because I could see that it hurt her pride to confide in me. I know she tried to tell her story to Melissa because she told me so. But Melissa didn’t want to hear it.

In the meantime Melissa got to be damn lazy. She did nothing all day. And I mean nothing. She sat in the break room from 9am until 1pm reading and eating and eating and eating. One day I went in and Melissa was eating bread sticks. There was a pizza box beside her. It was about 8:30 and I asked if she was eating lunch already. Oh no, just the bread sticks. She was saving the left over pizza for lunch. I took my break and went back to work. Melissa was still in the break room around 12 I came back. It was my half day but I had agreed to work over. I didn’t know how long I would be, so I wanted something out of the vending machine to tide me over.
Melissa was still sitting in the same spot eating the pizza. But it wasn’t left over, it was nearly whole- she was eating the second slice. I tried to get some doughnuts, but they didn’t fall. I beat on the machine and cussed at it but no luck, my doughnuts were stuck. I said, ‘Well, that was fatting anyway.’ I started to walk off and Melissa spoke up and said she’d buy some doughnuts and then mine would probably fall. I told her no, but she insisted. So we both got doughnuts. And then she sat down and ate six mini chocolate doughnuts. Then she went back to eating the pizza. When I left at 1:47 she was still in the same spot with various empty food wrappers sounding her.

Melissa was always complaining that she had far too much to do. I had a really stressful job that I hated. One day I got absolutely furious and decided to quit. Mark talked me out of it. He told me to just hold on a little longer, he was going to help me. He created a job for me as Melissa’s alternate. This was not exactly what Melissa wanted. She thought Mark should hire her an assistant. Mark made us equals and Melissa thought it was unfair.

So now I could see how much work there was. It wasn’t much at all. If you did what you were supposed to when you were supposed to do it you could get it all done. Everyday I finished up at 1:30 and then I had to find ways to occupy myself until the shift ended at 6. Melissa kept complaining that there was too much to do and she couldn’t possibly manage it all. She told every one that I just didn’t do as much. No one really believed that so she started telling people that I messed up a lot so she always had to go behind me and redo my work. That was bullshit and that’s when we started fighting and this is where I must end for now. Next time I’ll talk about how she slept in the parking lot and washed her underwear in the ladies room sink.