John Sandman

Debt Collectors In Love

The student loan Kay Pigeon's daughter Leenie got to attend film school in LA was supposed to make her life sublime. Instead it condemned her to debt after she graduated into the 2008 recession and a job in the food service industry.

Leenie's loan, which Kay co-signed, plus the Wall Street trade paper she writes for are making her life miserable. That paper, Securities International News, is collapsing as Kay struggles with journalism's transition from print to the internet at the start of the decade.

While Leenie is on the West Coast waiting on tables, the phone in Kay's apartment constantly rings with call from the loan servicer in Pennsylvania, most often from call center rep Doris Morris. The payments, which Kay is responsible for, are being applied to the wrong loan. Kay gets no help from the peevish Doris, until she wants to dish about the corruption at the loan servicer. It's Kay's opportunity to write an expose--which may lead to another job--while getting to the bottom of her own problem.

Debt Collectors In Love takes a trip through Millennial debt, casino gambling, the excesses of Wall Street, early stage Alzheimer's disease, the impact of social media on journalism and workplace gender conflict. In the end, when everyone has deserted her, the thing Kay can always count on is having to pay her daughter's student loan.

Selected Works

Fiction

Debt Collectors In Love

Kay Pigeon co-signed her daughter's student loan and is holding the bag when she can't pay. After finding that the loan servicer has not been posting her payments correctly, Kay meets a customer service rep who promises to help her expose wrong-doing at the servicer.

Praying For Rain

In Praying For Rain, pitcher Carl Hubbs and catcher Joe Sperma are involved in a low-rent struggle to keep their minor league baseball careers afloat in hurricane-ravaged South Florida of the 1970s.

Nonfiction

Student Loan Call Center Trolls and the Debtors Who Hate Them

Old Racial Policies Still Affect HIV/AIDS in the New South Africa

When HIV/AIDS surfaced in South Africa during the 1990s, public health officials were slow to react.

Failing the Test; AIDS Policy Ignores Family Planning

By the mid-1990s, public health officials in the United States had become concerned that women of child-bearing years were at risk of contracting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Yet family planning agencies were slow to recognize the needs of vulnerable clients. Advocates for people with AIDS believed that mandatory name reporting of people being tested for HIV discouraged at-risk individuals from being tested and getting access to treatment and prevention strategies.

A story in the November-December 1994 New Jersey Reporter examined these issues in New Jersey, a state which then ranked fifth in the nation for the number of AIDS cases.

The conflict then between state health departments, most of which identified people by name when they were tested, and advocates for people with AIDS and HIV who generally supported unique identifiers, was thought at one point to have hindered the fight against the disease.

Could Trade Messages Help Unravel Madoff Fraud?

In the wake of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the Financial Information eXchange Protocol could have led examiners to the fraud.

The CSE Program: A Failed Experiment

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Consolidated Supervised Entities Program regulated investment bank holding companies such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Critics say it contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.

The New Loan Sharks

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