Employee of the Year

Chapter 16 - The Balance Due

I drove back to Passion that afternoon feeling frustrated that once again my adventures out in RiversideCounty hadn’t turned up any real leads. When I walked into the call center, it was bustling. I could see from the service level screens that every agent was fully occupied on the phone. I saw something else on the screen that surprised me: though we primarily did outbound calls, the agents were getting bombarded with inbound calls. I overheard a few agents talking; most sounded like they were on the defensive, apologizing and trying to calm down the people at the other end of the line.

When I reached my cubicle, I found a note from Teresa on the keyboard instructing me to go to the same conference room that we’d used two days ago to review the Stark case.

The same players from the prior Stark meeting sat around the table: Teresa, Roland, Charlie, Larry, and Gina. Olivia, of course, was still recuperating in the hospital. The group stared glumly at a television set wheeled in to a corner.

A thick, well-dressed man was on the screen. He wore a goatee and a button-down shirt showing a gold crucifix around his neck. I’d seen the same guy preaching on the cable prayer shows before. But this clip was from the morning news.

“The Bible is very clear on this matter. Proverbs tells us ‘The rich rule over the poor and the borrower is the slave of the lender.’ These banks are trying to enslave our people. What Passion Financial is doing to Beth Stark is beyond the pale. Less than a day after her ex-husband’s suicide, this company is actually coming after her to pay the deceased’s credit card bills. They sent a collections agent to the steps of my church! I cannot allow my congregant to be harassed like this. What has the world come to that we allow these companies like Passion to hunt down victims of a terrible tragedy like the Stark death? Have we no shame left in this society? Have we no decency?”

“There you go,” Charlie said, turning off the TV. “That man is Pat Isaac, the televangelist who runs New Redemption, the mega-church in Lake Forest where Beth Stark worships. He’s going public about how we are terrorizing a member of his flock, badgering the helpless wife of the late Jesse Stark. This is just one clip. He’s all over the news, the talk shows. Then he’s going to cover it on his cable sermon later this afternoon.”

“The phones have been ringing off the hook all day,” Teresa said. “Our whole floor is completely crippled with all the inbound complaints. The call assignment software crashed twice this morning from the heavy load.”

“Have you listened in on some of the calls?” Gina asked.

Teresa nodded. “A lot of death threats. They want to know our agents name, where they live. People on the floor are getting scared.”

Gina beat her fist on the table and turned to Roland. “What the hell happened down there? What did you do to screw this up so bad?”

Roland covered his face in shame. I’d never seen him like this before: so drained, so defeated.

“We’ve been through this,” he said. “I met the wife on the steps coming out of the church and identified myself. Isaac’s men intercepted me right away. They were the ones who started making such a big fuss about me being from a collections agency.”

“You realize the damage you’ve done?” Gina continued. “How could you be so stupid as to go up to her on church property? Everybody who watches television knows that Isaac is a publicity hound. He’s always looking for a new demon to crusade against.”

“Roland didn’t do anything wrong,” Teresa said firmly, cutting off Gina’s rant. She wasn’t going to let one of her people get attacked in a public setting, even by someone from the CEO’s office. “I told him to go down there. The church was the only public place that we knew we could find her. She doesn’t answer calls. She doesn’t answer the door at the Lake Forest address where she lives with her sister. My agent did the best he could so let’s stop looking for scapegoats.”