Teresa looked at the screen and the screen was white and there was one name on it. The name was not Peterson. It was a company she did not know and it had one small lease for a copier.

My eyes burn and they are red from the shampoo this morning. The light from the monitor is too bright and it makes the burning worse. I tried to wash the soap out but the soap stayed and now the world is a blur.

Mark stood behind her and he looked at the screen and he was happy. He liked the new system because the new system had a dashboard. The dashboard had bars and the bars were green.

The Shape of the Day

For eleven years Teresa used the printer. The printer sat in the corner and it was loud and it spit out a long list every morning at eight. The paper was thermal and it curled at the edges. Teresa would take the list to her desk and she would sit down with a cup of black coffee.

She had three pens and they were different colors. She had three symbols of her own invention:

She would look at the list and she would see the shape of the day. She saw the peaks and she saw the valleys. She grouped the work and she was the master of the work.

Now the printer is quiet and the paper is gone. Mark says the queue is efficiency but the queue is a wall. It is a wall between the worker and the logic of the business. The queue hands out one item at a time and it hides the rest. It is like looking through a straw. You see the color of the paint but you do not see the house.

Fragmenting the Relationship

The Peterson group was a large customer. They leased backhoes and they leased trucks and they leased a generator. They had four different accounts and the accounts were in different stages of delinquency. In the old way Teresa saw all four accounts on her list. She saw that they were all the same parent company.

She called Sarah at the Peterson office and they talked about the weather and they talked about Sarah’s dog. Then they talked about the four accounts. They settled the business in one call and the call took twelve minutes.

Today the system showed Teresa one account for the Peterson generator. She finished the work and she clicked the Next button. The system did not give her the Peterson backhoe. It gave her a dry cleaner in Ohio. The backhoe account went to a man named David on the second floor. David did not know Sarah and he did not know about the dog. He called Sarah an hour later and Sarah was annoyed.

She had just finished talking to the company. She told David to wait. Then the third Peterson account went to a woman named June and June called Sarah after lunch. Sarah became angry and she stopped answering the phone. The work grew and the time grew but the dashboard said the system was efficient.

The Engine of the Book

This happens in the world of equipment financing software when the focus is on the wrong thing. Some systems are built to control the people and some systems are built to power the servicing. The servicing is the heart of the book. You have contracts and you have collateral and you have people. They must all stay in sync.

If the software is a black box then the people become parts of the machine. They lose the ability to see the portfolio and they lose the ability to think. The architecture of a system should be open. It should be API-first so the data can move and the people can see.

There are billing changes and there are in-life modifications. There are end-of-term buyouts and there are returns. If the team cannot see the whole portfolio then they are just clicking a button. They are waiting for the next item in the queue.

The Illusion of Fairness

I sat at my desk and I tried to blink the shampoo away. The burning was a dull throb and it reminded me that the physical world is different from the world on the screen. On the screen everything is a neat row. In the physical world there is soap in your eye and there is a bookkeeper named Sarah who is tired of being called.

The queue is sold as fairness. It ensures that no one person gets all the easy accounts. It ensures that everyone is working at the same pace. But fairness is not the same as effectiveness. It is fair to give every soldier one bullet but it is not effective if you are fighting a war.

Lendscape understands the servicing floor. They know that the back office is where the money is made or lost. If you have to hire more people every time you add more leases then your system is broken. You want to scale without adding headcount. You want the system to do the heavy lifting of billing and taxes and ACH reconciliation. But you want the people to remain humans. You want them to see the Peterson group as a group.

Teresa clicked the button again. The screen was white and then it was blue. The blue was the color of a company that leased medical equipment. She looked at the clock. It was only ten in the morning. Usually she would be halfway through her list. She would know how much work was left. Now she knew nothing. The queue was infinite. There was always a next item and the next item was always a surprise.

The surprise is a form of stress. When you do not know what is coming you cannot prepare. You cannot pace yourself. You are a passenger in your own day. The manager thinks he is a pilot but he is just a man looking at a map of a place he has never been. He sees the green bars and he thinks the flight is going well. He does not see that the passengers are sick and the engine is on fire.

You could smell the paper and you could see the coffee stains. It was not digital but it was real. The digital world has no weight. A million-dollar lease looks the same as a thousand-dollar lease on the screen. They are both just pixels and light.

The High Price of Control

The “servicing engine” should be a tool for the person. It should give them the data they need when they need it. It should connect to the AI assistants and it should expose the portfolio data through servers. It should allow for in-life changes without a vendor ticket. It should be a system that the lender owns.

Mark came back to Teresa’s desk. He had a printout of the new dashboard. “Look at the handle time, Teresa. It is down by eighteen seconds per account.”

“And how many times did we call the Peterson group today?”

“That is not the metric we are tracking,” Mark said.

“We called them four times. It took forty minutes of our time and an hour of theirs. Last week it took twelve minutes.”

– Teresa, Servicing Operator

Mark looked at the green bars on his paper. He did not look at Teresa. He did not see the red in her eyes. “The system is efficient,” he said. He walked away and his shoes made a clicking sound on the hard floor. Teresa looked at the button. It said Next. She did not want to see what was next. She wanted to see what was whole. She wanted to see the day but the day was hidden behind the blue light.

I will go to the bathroom and I will wash my eyes again. I will use cold water and I will stay there until the burning stops. The water is real and the cold is real. The queue is just an idea and it is a bad one. We are building systems that make people smaller and we call it progress. We are trading the view of the forest for a close-up of a leaf and we wonder why we are lost.

A good servicing platform does not hide the world. It maps it. It allows the operator to group the work and see the patterns and finish the day. It turns the worker back into a master. Until then we will just keep clicking the button and we will wonder where the time went.

The time went into the gaps between the items. The time went into the frustration of Sarah at the Peterson group. The time went into the green bars on Mark’s report. It is a high price to pay for the illusion of control.