- Snip -   

      I saw this same kind corporate kindness of letting someone off the hook by letting them work off a debt instead of going to jail once again a few years later. This time, the corporation involved had to bend over backward to placate this particular individual because of the particular kind of indiscretion involved.

      In the Spring of 1971, a friend had a friend with a small insurance agency. The agent had just bought out another larger agency. My friend wanted to know if I would help out through the transition by phoning the newly purchased clients and basically attuning them to the specific benefits of staying on as clients within the merged agency. The boss was in his middle thirties.

      The office was a small two room affair on the main floor of a small one story office building on one of Vancouver’s busier suburban commercial streets. It didn’t look like I would be indenturing myself for life, so I said, “Why not”.

      I was bought a new suit and tie and started the next morning. My job was handling the phone plus calling up the newly acquired customer list when the phone wasn’t ringing. I kept thinking that if an electrician called I’d know exactly what to say.

      I did this for about two weeks. I worked the phone all day and came in after dinner for a couple of more hours every night. I came in one night and the place was completely black except for the glow of a lit cigarette in the boss’s office at the back. I knew he was there because I could see the cigarette glow bloom up every time he took a drag.

      I turned on the front lights and went to his office to see what was up. Looking like he had just been shit out of a bulldog, he sat there staring straight ahead out of big wide baleful eyes puffing slowly on the cigarette.

      “What on earth happened”, I asked, figuring something like maybe a car accident. Turns out, not exactly. When he had gotten home for dinner that night, the wife was gone, the kids were gone, and all the furniture was gone. The only thing left were the wires sticking up where the stove had been.

      “What on earth for?”. I asked, intending less to pry than to be like there for him. His story definitely had to rate as chapter one in a book of things not to do.

      Apparently our boy had decided to go into politics. The province of British Columbia at the time had been under the rule of a Social Credit government for years. The Social Credit party was an old boy’s club of successful businessmen. You had to be a successful businessman to even join the party let alone run for office. Kind of sounds like everybody’s politics of today.

      Our boy had apparently been quietly aspiring for some time for big things within the Social Credit party. So he figured he had better up the ante on his little insurance company show. The thinking was that a little insurance agency wasn’t big business enough to make a noise but two little agencies together could be. When he heard that the owner of the other agency was planning to retire, he made an offer.

      He would pay part now and the rest six months later. The only problem was that financially he was somewhere between the now and later himself. So he arranged to borrow the money six months down the road for the second payment and for the down payment he dipped into his agency’s current transfer account. If you’re into the insurance business at all, I’m sure that last remark caught your direct attention.

      The transfer account is the part of the money which comes in from the paying customers that’s earmarked to go to the actual parent company to buy the actual insurance policy the agency just purchased for the customer on their behalf. An agent touching the transfer account is like a lawyer touching a trust fund. Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go.

      Mom had been involved in one of those deals in the mid-sixties. When she was a kid in Moose Jaw, Granddad has pulled her out of school and put her to work as his legal secretary for a number of years. So she knew the ropes. After Dad had moved out in the earlier sixties she had gone back to work as a legal secretary.

      The lawyer she worked for was fiddling with the trust accounts and she was looking right at it. She came home one night right in the middle of a moral dilemma about it and wondered what she should do. Greydie and I told her she should do what she felt right, so she blew the whistle on him and he went to jail for a couple of years. The moral is, never let your secretary know what you’re doing.

- Snip -