Word: collectable
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Suzanne Simmonds was fed up. For 6 1/2 years, she had been unable to collect the child support her ex-boyfriend was legally required to pay. So in January 2001 she signed a contract with Child Support Network. She agreed to pay the Arizona company a $500 application fee and a 35% commission on any collections of the $3,800 owed to her daughter. After five months, the agency had pocketed $885, and Simmonds had received just $215. When she tried to get out of the contract, the company refused, ordered her to pay more than...
...bounty-hunting industry might not exist if the government were more competent. The state is supposed to collect child support free of charge. The welfare-reform act of 1996 tried to make the job easier by linking government databases and requiring firms to report new employees to child-support agencies. The Bush Administration made deadbeats an issue in July when it began arresting dozens of delinquent parents nationwide. But collection rates are still feeble. The amount of unpaid child support nearly doubled from 1996 to 2000, according to the latest available figures from the General Accounting Office, paving...
...after hiring Supportkids in 1999, she gladly received a lump-sum payment of $7,590--after Supportkids took its 34% commission. When the state agency suggested that she might be better off canceling her contract with Supportkids, she recalls asking, "What are you, crazy? Then who's going to collect the money...
...secretive, Salman Rushdie-like writer whose latest book incites riots. Completing the traditional arts, Angel, a musician who can make stones sing, lives there too. Mixing Ingmar Bergman with Monty Python, strange, vaguely metaphorical characters pop in and out. Pudgy, bowler-hatted men regularly visit the writer to collect anything that he loves, giving them over to a mad doctor who dissects the objects, looking for their soul. The painter receives a visit from a mute gallery owner who keeps word-cards in his pocket and forms malapropisms like, "Oh, sheep I've lost all my sobbing colours...
...alive with children seemingly in competition with the Thais for claim to the title "The Land of Smiles." Poor though they may be?indeed, East Timor is now officially the poorest country in Asia?most seem to have generosity in their genes. Boys scamper up palm trees to collect coconuts and offer them gratis to parched visitors traveling along the trail. Then again, it may be a clever sales ploy: once stopped it's not long before you're offered a liter bottle of fermented palm wine for a dollar, with a kick to match that of the sturdy Timorese...