REPOSSESSION

July 11, 2011

Stop me if you’ve heard the one about a Mexican, a car tag, and a repossession. Today while balancing clerk A3’s drawer, we realized that she was a specific amount of money short.

“I knew it was that darn Jesus!” she exclaimed. Jesus being pronounced as in our Lord and Savior Jesus. I was uncomfortable with this, and I wondered what she was talking about. Come to realize that Jesus (pronounced Hey Soos) was a Latino customer that she had waited on earlier. There was a problem with his tag renewal, and she was afraid at the time that something had gone awry with the transaction.

I tried to call our friend, Jesus, at the number he had listed. He answered “Hello” instead of the usual “Bueno” that I hear when the Latinos greet other Latinos on the telephone. When I announced who I was and where I was calling from, there was silence on the other end of the line. I wasn’t sure the person was there, so I said, “Hello, hello.” The line went dead. I wonder if Jesus feared deportation…given my line of work, it is a valid fear. I have been watching a lot of Border Wars on NatGeo this week, but I like to think of myself as friend of the Latinos. I was the “good cop.”

When I told my super what happened, Supertramp (said with love—no innuendo intended) was mad, and only became livid as she made a few more attempts to contact Jesus. She is the bad cop.

Did you know that your tag can be repossessed for failure to pay for it? Does this mean that if you don’t get a steekah for la placa and you drive around expired that someone will steal your tag off your car in the night? Not really, but if you make an attempt to pay for your tag and your attempt fails, and you don’t try to make it right, then you never paid for it, and your tag can be repossessed by a County Official.

Our case today was a simple misunderstanding. I have an amigo that I contacted to try to see if I could get situation smoothed over, but mi amigo doesn’t seem to know Jesus. Not surprising. Would I think that he would know somebody just because he is Mexican? It is possible that they do know each other, but there is a likelihood that they don’t. Either way, good cop did her job. I tried. I tried to be nice, I tried to smooth it over. In this case, I’m not being met halfway. I only hope that tomorrow there is Jesus at the door of the office at 8am with the difference of the money still owed, and if not, there will be an inspector with a screwdriver in Little Mexico taking back what does not belong there.