John Sandman

Works

Debt Collectors In Love Amazon Link
Debt Collectors In Love delves into the world of student loan servicing and how one borrower got jobbed by the very people who were supposed to help her pay off the debt--the loan servicer.
Cover of Kindle Edition

Debt Collectors In Love
The student loan Kay Pigeon's daughter Leenie got to attend film school in LA was supposed to make her life sublime. Instead it condemned her to debt after she graduated into the 2008 recession and a job in the food service industry


Leenie's loan, which Kay c0-signed, plus the Wall Street trade paper she writes for are making her life miserable. That paper, Securities International News, is collapsing as Kay struggles with journalism's transition from print to the internet at the start of the decade.


While Leenie is on the West Coast waiting on tables, the phone in Kay's apartment constantly rings with call from the loan servicer in Pennsylvania, most often from call center rep Doris Morris. The payments, which Kay is responsible for, are being applied to the wrong loan. Kay gets no help from the peevish Doris, until she wants to dish about the corruption at the loan servicer. It's Kay's opportunity to write an expose--which may lead to another job--while getting to the bottom of her own problem.


Debt Collectors In Love takes a trip through Millennial debt, casino gambling, the excesses of Wall Street, early stage Alzheimer's disease, the impact of social media on journalism and workplace gender conflict. In the end, when everyone has deserted her, the thing Kay can always count on is having to pay her daughter's student loan.





Praying For Rain
In a review in NINE, A Journal of Baseball History and Social PerspectivesPeter Carino wrote "Characterization is not Sandman's only strength. While paralleling Sperma's and Hubbs's baseball careers to create the plot, he effectively manages a third-person narrator who shifts between Hubbs's and Sperma's perspective to examine their responses to baseball life."



Old Racial Policies Still Affect HIV/AIDS in the New South Africa
South Africa, emerged from decades of apartheid imposed by a ruling white minority in the mid-1990s—just as the AIDS epidemic was beginning to surface there. But as with other facets of life, health care delivery was defined by apartheid, and this story touches on the country’s response to HIV/AIDS.

Mzwakhe Mbuli, South African poet and singer
South African singer Mzwakhe Mbuli is a South African poet and singer whose work lives on both sides of the pre- and post-Apartheid divide

Failing the Test; AIDS Policy Ignores Family Planning
Women of child bearing years were ignored by family planning agencies in the early days of the AIDS crisis.

The CSE Program: A Failed Experiment
Critics of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Consolidated Supervised Entities Program believe that its lax regulation encouraged Wall Street’s investment bank holding companies’ risky investment practices, leading to the end of the investment bank holding companies as they were once known and the credit freeze of 2008.

Spitzer SAR Disclosure an AML Breach
Former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer may have been on the other side of the law when a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) filed against him was discovered.

Could Trade Messages Help Unravel Madoff Fraud?
In the wake of Bernard Madoff’s decades-long Ponzi scheme, trader log files in the Financial Information eXchange Protocol, or FIX, which is used to trade stocks, could have helped lead investigators to the fraud.

The New Loan Sharks
The payday lending industry has been built on borrowers who find that loans of a few hundred dollars can end up costing serveral thousand before they are paid off. Regulation, which is split between Federal and state governments, is often not equal to the task of preventing these businesses from abusing their customers.

Selected Works

Fiction
Kay Pigeon co-signed her daughter's student loan and is holding the bag when she can't pay. After finding that the loan servicer has not been posting her payments correctly, Kay meets a customer service rep who promises to help her expose wrong-doing at the servicer.
Praying For Rain features left-handed pitcher Carl Hubbs and catcher Joe Sperma and their low-rent struggle against to keep their waning minor league baseball careers a float in the hurricane ravaged South Florida of the 1970s.

Sperma is an electrical engineer by training and a baseball lifer. He resists a job offer at NASA, which symbolizes the end of his life in baseball--and his youth. The mercurial Hubbs, who is unable to harness and electric but erratic right arm. Hubbs depends on Sperma keep him on an even keel and Sperma finds that he stays in the game as much to launch Hubbs's career. As this odd couple hangs on the margins of the Florida State League, they try to glean the meaning of life as it's lived inside the white lines.

Nonfiction
When HIV/AIDS surfaced in South Africa during the 1990s, public health officials were slow to react.
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Consolidated Supervised Entities Program regulated investment bank holding companies such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Critics say it contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.
In the wake of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the Financial Information eXchange Protocol could have led examiners to the fraud.
By the mid-1990s, public health officials in the United States had become concerned that women of child-bearing years were at risk of contracting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Yet family planning agencies were slow to recognize or react the needs of vulnerable clients. Name reporting of people being tested for HIV was thought to drive those who should have been tested underground.

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