“Step Away from the Computer and Stand Against the Wall” – Posted: Apr 2, 07:08 AM – Filed under: History Personal
I was never the type of person who used my computer for malicious and illegal things but a man with a badge was telling me to “Step away from the computer and stand against the wall.” What have I done that would warrant this? I remember downloading a couple albums recently, but that’s really it.
No time to think; the man was walking towards me and I hadn’t yet stepped away from my computer. Again, he said, “Step away from the computer and stand against the wall.” Entirely uncertain what I might have done wrong, my mind went foggy and I stood up. At that moment I noticed he wasn’t alone, but his badge-wielding buddies weren’t following him as he came directly towards me. Instead, they went off to different areas of the office and were saying the same canned line to my coworkers, all twenty-five of them.
Within minutes, we were all standing against the wall wondering what the hell was going on and I was relieved that they weren’t there for me. They were there for my boss, but where was he?
Ten months earlier, I landed this job, my very first job in the web design and development industry (Read that story), and I was this company’s in-house designer/developer for the small handful of websites they owned. This company was called Better Budget Financial Services and they were in the business of settling people’s debts.
The way they settled their customer’s debts seemed fairly simple to me, but I barely cared since I was only there to design and write code. From what I was told, BBFS would advise their debt-burdened customers to stop paying their overdue bills and instead take that money and deposit it into a new checking account. Months would pass, the companies who these customers owed money would go unpaid, the customer had saved up a respectable chunk of money, and a representative from BBFS would call each company and say something along the lines of, “I am calling on behalf of Client Name and as I understand it, they haven’t been paying you anything towards the $10,000.00 they owe you. Would you settle this debt, right now, for $6,000.00?”
You’d be shocked at how often it worked. The company had received no payments for the past six months, year, or more and they were now given the opportunity to recoup some of the money they were owed. They often saw this settlement as a better option than hunting people down and potentially getting nothing out of their efforts. Typically, companies would agree and settle for half of the debt the client owed, sometimes more, sometimes less. BBFS made money by taking 25% of what the client saved, so in the example above, 25% of $4,000 is $1,000, and that would be BBFS’s fee. There was another small fee for becoming a client of BBFS, but it was cupcakes—nothing worth writing about.
I had always thought it was a shady practice—telling people to stop paying their bills and then telling the company who was owed, “Take this substantially lower pay-off, or nothing.”—but what did I care? I had no part of the process and simply designed and maintained three or four brochure sites for BBFS. It was blissful ignorance.
I started caring on that morning when my coworkers and I were standing against the wall and told to stay put by a man in jeans holding a badge.
Apparently, six months prior to that day, four months after I was hired, a small team from the Federal Trade Commission had rented an empty office-space in adjacent building and setup some sort of spy-like research project to keep an eye on all of the things BBFS was doing.
I later learned that some customers of BBFS had been complaining that their debts weren’t settled with nearly as much savings as they had been promised and there were also questionable connections between the profits the company had made and some spending habits the owner had. It was enough to get the FTC interested and it’s clear that the business itself, no matter how cleanly run, was part of a shady industry to begin with.
So there we were, twenty-five of us, standing against the wall. Some of us were more vocal than others and I’m willing to bet some of the silent people already had an idea regarding what was going on. Me, I just stood there wondering what the hell the company did wrong and if I would have a job the following week. As it turned out, I wouldn’t have a job the following day.
The three or four folks from the FTC were being tight-lipped regarding why they were there and why we were standing against the wall, but they were asking where our boss was. I hadn’t the foggiest idea. He was the boss and often out of the office handing business things. After about 20 minutes of standing there, one of the people from the FTC did finally clue us in, only slightly, to why they were there, why we were standing against a wall, and what might come of this ordeal.
They were there to shut the company down, no questions asked, and we were standing against the wall because our computers were so closely connected to private customer information.
Thirty minutes later, a man whose official job title was something like Receiver had arrived with a locksmith in tow. With a proverbial wave of his hand, he owned the company and all of its assets… literally. The locks were swapped for something only he and his crew had the keys to and every non-sales employee was interviewed for about fifteen minutes. At this point, my boss was back and in his office with the door shut, undoubtedly trying his hardest to talk his way out of the mess he got himself into. It was a waste of his energy; he didn’t own any of the company’s assets anymore.
When they interviewed me, I was asked what I did for the company and whether or not I had access to one of our client data servers. I truly did not, so I was simply told, “You may leave, be sure to grab your personal belongings, and I’m sorry that all of this happened to you.” It was a kind way of saying, “You don't have a job anymore and it’s not my problem.”
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t oddly excited. Yes, I was shitting my pants about not having a job all of a sudden, but I was slightly pumped for being involved in such a Hollywood-like day. I was flashed a badge, told to step away from my computer and to stand against the wall.
That was awesome.
— Marc Amos
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That is eerily similar to a job situation a good friend of mine was in prior to the one where I met him… Gonna have him read this!
— Tom – Apr 2, 08:27 AM – #
Dude. Sweet.
— Todd – Apr 15, 07:55 AM – #