Distressed home owners all across the fruited plain are walking away from hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and no one seems bothered about it.  Well, not enough to hound them for the money anyway.

Small time deadbeats don't have the same luxury.  The prospects of collecting a few hundred or thousand bucks from them are much more likely than collecting the aforementioned hundreds of thousands.  So, small-time debt collection remains a growth industry.

Stiff the mortgage company with impunity, just don't try to walk on that Verizon contract you signed.

The Sneed family is being besieged with calls from debt collectors.  On a nearly daily basis we get one call or another asking for Shawn.  Since we have a strict 'no deadbeat' policy here at Casa Sneed, it goes without saying that Shawn doesn't live here.  He merely uses our phone number for his various schemes.

I've tried to tell these folks that they have the wrong number and that I don't know anything about Shawn or his whereabouts, but it does no good, they just call back.  Even when they promise not to call anymore, they call.

For instance, when I told a caller this morning that Shawn does not live here and that I wished him to stop calling, he told me that was too bad and hung up on me.

Most of these collectors make it nearly impossible for you to call them back, so I looked up Alliance One, his company, on the internet and started calling headquarters until I reached someone.  That someone told me that my number wasn't in their system and that I was mistaken in my belief that they had called me.

Who am I supposed to believe, her or my lying ears?

But, they misunderestimate the resolve of Merle Wayne Sneed to be a pain in their ass.

The Alliance One collection company proudly boasts on their recording that they are a collector for Wells Fargo Bank and CITI Bank.  I wondered if Wells Fargo and CITI Bank knew if they were employing lying skunks.

Turning to the internets once more, I found the email addresses of a number of bank bigwigs and fired off a mass email letting them know that the Alliance One collection company is creepy.

Who, you might ask, would want to employ creepy collectors?  Not the president of Wells Fargo, that's for sure, because this very afternoon I received a call from one of his people letting me know that they would be investigating what is going on over at the Alliance One collection company.  They promise a swift resolution to this matter.

Some cynical types might think smoke is being blown up my arse, but just a few weeks ago, I used the same tactic with another collector for another bank in California and I got a follow-up call from the collector, anxious to get my number out of their system.

Now, if I could just get that little mofo Shawn to stop giving out my number.


Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky