After 26 years as an Illawarra debt collector, Steve Bosilkovski reckons serving papers was one of the trickiest parts.
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He would do his homework, ensure he knew as much about the recipient as possible - what they looked like, where they should be at what time.
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Sometimes, if they refused to take the papers, Mr Bosilkovski could leave them at their feet - mission accomplished.
One day he served an 80-something man this way.
He walked away, only to have the old man jump onto his back in sudden protest.
"I found out later he was an eccentric," said Mr Bosilkovski, who quit his business, Warrawong-based South Coast Credit Services, in 2009 and bought a general store.
"He had the money but just wouldn't pay. You meet a few characters along the way."
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Mr Bosilkovski said he had stopped watching Tricky Business - the Illawarra-set TV series about a family of mercantile agents - because it was too far removed from the reality experienced by he and wife Donna, who was once a qualified sub-agent within the business.
Tricky Business peaked at 68,062 and averaged at 40,220 in the Illawarra and South Coast last week, compared to 66,947 and 54,404 viewers on its debut.
A continuing plotline - involving Lincoln Lewis as a fledgling mercantile agent who becomes romantically involved with the woman he was supposed to serve - would never happen, Mr Bosilkovski said.
"It's a conflict of interest," he explained.
"[Debt collecting] is a very misunderstood industry. It's not an easy field to get into. You're fingerprinted, there are background checks.
"[The show] is the Days of Our Lives of mercantile agents.
"The one thing I like about it is that it's probably let people know what 'mercantile agent' means. And it's good to see Wollongong and the area on TV."
Mr Bosilkovski's most memorable jobs included a woman in the Illawarra who answered the door completely naked.
He did the right thing, he thought, when he let a mother with a young child in the back seat drive from "the middle of nowhere" back to civilisation before he went to repossess her car, but she repaid the favour by parking in her partner's yard, where it couldn't be retrieved.
Surveillance jobs - at the behest of ex-wives or those who were soon-to-be - paid $50 an hour but weren't nearly as much fun as in the movies.
"You sit there and wait and wait and wait and wait," Mr Bosilkovski said.
The Nine Network might have lost this viewer, but there is still his wife. Mrs Bosilkovski is keeping an interested eye on plot developments.
"You wouldn't watch it if it were too much [like real life]," she said.
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