February 2nd, 2006 → 7:14 pm @ terry
Ninety-nine percent of today was spent doing residential mortgage inspections. I know I am back into the routine when I am doing a route that contains nothing other than these type of field inspections.
I worked an area that I have worked for many years. It is an area that no-one in our office has ever volunteered to work or other than reluctantly offered to help. It is a poor part of the county with a somewhat deserved bad reputation. Also, there are very few street signs left; I think they have all been sold for scrap.
Since I have worked the area for so long, it always goes well for me. And, there were no FEMA inspections in the batch so for a route consisting of forty properties, I had to take only 16 pictures.
I finished early so I have been home for a large part of the day. I’ve been working off and on with the pictures for the commercial inspections I did the last two days. If anyone knows of a better way to deal with all these photos, please let me know.
I am pretty quick to speak my mind and often I should not, but that’s just the way I am. To make ammends a bit, let me tell you of a phone call I made last week. I had an insurance loss inspection scheduled for 4:30pm and the gentleman I met made a comment that reminded me of this phone call. I thought it would be appropriate to pass it along to you. I will try to be brief and to the point.
In our office, we keep the pulse of every zip code we work. We can pretty much tell you at any point in time how the work load compares to last week, last month, or last year.
A while back we noticed that the work in a few zip codes fell off pretty severly and then they almost stopped. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know what happened.
I called our rep and explained matter of factly that not all business decisions should necessarily be made with an eye on the bottom line! I went on to state that the zip codes that they cut were needed by the rep in that area. I further explained that the income from those inspections helped feed the kids and pay the bills; it was not “extra money”.
Well, much to my surprise, the very next day we started receiving work orders for that area again. This happened with the one company that has always been the most difficult to work with and the company that seems to have the least loyalty to the field reps. So, maybe I should lighten up a bit; maybe they are not as bad as I want to say they are – someone there has a heart.
I may return to the blog a bit later but for now I better get back to those pictures!