Entry 462: Can Somebody Please Do Something Right?

We are scheduled to close on our new house on Tuesday, and I couldn't feel less confident about it while still believing it will actually happen.  The major issue is getting a large sum of money from S's parents' bank account into that of the settlement company.  This is our down payment.  S and I will then reimburse her parents after we close on our house the following week (still on schedule with that, knock on wood).  It's a bit annoying to have to do this, but that's just the way timing worked out, and we didn't want to make our offer contingent on selling our house, because we were worried they wouldn't accept it if we did.  It's mostly a seller's market here, so they don't have to be too accommodating to buyers.

S's dad had to move some money around on his end before he could make the transfer.  He did that a few weeks ago, and then he went into his bank in person (he's old school, so he doesn't do anything online or anything like that), and set up a transfer to take effect yesterday (48 business hours before closing).  He did it in advance because he was going on vacation and not returning until yesterday.

So, everything is swell until we get an email from the bank saying that actually he would have to be there in person to sign-off on the transfer.  This is supremely annoying, considering the entire reason he went in early is because he knew it would be difficult to go in on the day of the transfer.  And the bank initially was fine with this.  Why shouldn't they be?  If he went into the bank and made a transfer that day, it would have gone through.  What's the difference, from the bank's end, between it going through that day, or going through two weeks later?  Either way, he's there in person authorizing it.  It's effectively the same thing.  It's like writing somebody a check and then having to sign it a second time when they cash it.  It defeats the entire purpose.  (By the way, the reason he didn't just transfer it when he went in two weeks ago is because the settlement company told us not to do it so far in advance for some reason.)

But the bank is insistent.  Despite what they already told us, he would have to be there in person.  Thankfully, he took a red-eye home from vacation, so despite a connecting flight being delayed four hours, he's able to get to the bank around 3:30 pm, and make the transfer.  Done.  He sends us a picture of the confirmation letter.  I'm relieved... temporarily.

At around 4:00 pm, I get a frantic call telling me -- get this -- the fucking settlement company gave us the wrong transfer information!  I shit you not.  Instead of giving us their information, they gave us the information for the seller (some development company).  So, my father-in-law, bless his soul, dutifully following the instructions he was provided, wired our down payment, directly to the seller, and apparently this is major breach of protocol.

S, the hero in this narrative, noticed the disconnect, but just a bit too late.  She couldn't figure out why we were paying the seller our down payment directly before closing, but for our current house we had to wait until after closing to get our money from the settlement company.  So, she called our agent, who said something was indeed wrong, and he had her call the settlement company, and the woman handling our case there was basically like, "Oops... my bad.  Can you have your dad cancel that transfer?"  But S couldn't because it already went through, and she was livid.  I've never seen her this mad before, and it wasn't just anger -- it was annoyance, contempt, exacerbation, and several other feelings that don't even have names.  Not only was our entire down payment in the wrong hands, but we just put S's dad through this whole song and dance to get this damn transfer done, and now it  was all for naught.

The thing is these wire instructions aren't transmitted casually.  They are uploaded/downloaded through a secure portal and treated as highly sensitive documents (understandably so).  How the fuck, then, do you give us the wrong instructions?  How do you not double-check that?  Her excuse is that the wrong file had a similar name as the correct one.  So open the damn file and make sure it's right!  I don't press send on emails to family members without double-checking the pertinent information.  How do you not do this with somebody's life savings on the line?  Infuriating.  She's playing with my money and just like Big Worm says: Playing with my money is like playing with my emotions.



S happened to be at our bank to wire transfer the closing costs to the settle company (as if they deserve it), when all this went down.  So, she's literally sitting with a bank employee, at like 4:30 on Good Friday, making frantic phone call after frantic phone call, trying to get this all figured out before we push more money out into cyberspace.  Eventually she got in contact with the seller and they confirmed that they have the money, and so now they are going to wire it to the settlement company, so that the settlement company can eventually wire it back to them.  It seems beyond strange to me, but I guess that's the way it has to go.  Personally, I think the seller should just get to keep it now, and the settlement company loses their cut for their mistake.  Apparently, they tried to do the transfer last night, but it was too late, so now we have an email saying they will do it on Monday.  That's how things currently stand.  Not great; I guess not disastrous.  Everything is still on schedule, but I can't say I have a ton of confidence it will all go off without a hitch.

I know people make mistakes, but giving the wrong account information for the transfer of a huge (to us) sum of money is not one that should ever happen.  Like I said, that should at least be double-checked.  S said it's a tiny bit her fault because she should have noticed that the transfer information said the name of the seller not the settlement company, but I put it on her 0%.  There was a) no reason for her to question instructions that come from a supposedly super secure portal; b) no reason for her to think anything was that off even if it did click that it was the seller's information and not the settlement company's.  What's one randomly named corporation versus another to her?  And ultimately the seller is getting the money anyway, so why would she think anything is that strange?  It's not like she's a real estate agent well-versed in this byzantine process, and it's not like she knows what sort of financial agreement the seller has the with the settlement company -- maybe it is supposed to go the seller as far as she could reasonably be concerned.  That she figured out something was amiss when she did is almost certainly better than I would have done in her shoes.  And it is much better she noticed it before everybody shut down for the weekend.

To make matters worse, I went out last night with some buddies, and I was so anxious about everything I drank too many beers to calm down, and now I feel the crap.  I'm blaming this on the settlement company too.  I'm channeling my inner Homer: This is everybody's fault but mine.



Until next time...

Entry 461: Bosses I Once Had, A Pointless History, Volume 2

I left off in Volume 1 mentioning that when I went back to TGI Friday's after my sophomore year of college to get my old job back it wasn't available.  My solution: I just lived at home and didn't work for the summer.  I sold it to my parents (who I'm sure didn't even care), by saying I would learn C++ over the summer.  So, I got a book and spent about four hours everyday programming a baseball simulator.  I had to use my parents' desktop (because this was back in the day when most families had a single computer for everybody, if they had one at all), so I would typically work from 10:00 pm until 2:00 am, when it was sure to be free.  I love those hours, and I loved that summer.  The simulator came out pretty well too.  I got it to where it could play a season, but it didn't have an A.I. component to it (no platooning, pitching changes, pinch-hitting, etc.).  I actually saved it and came back to it a few years ago with an intent to finish it, but it was so byzantine and the coding style was so irritatingly amateurish that I quickly abandoned that idea.

Because I didn't work for the summer I was really scraping by financially when I got back to school.  Loans and an allowance from my parents covered the necessities, but I needed beer and burrito money.  A friend of mine had a job at the Tutoring Center, so I got a job there as well.  The Tutoring center was basically the Algebra 101 help center -- that was what 95% of the students who used it need help with.  My boss there was named Heather Newfield (again, alias throughout).  She was pretty cool.  She was (and presumably still is) very smart, probably too smart for her job, which couldn't have paid much more than $35,000 a year.  But she loved living in our college town, which undoubtedly limited her options.

She was a fine boss, although she struggled mightily the few times she had to be a disciplinarian.  There was this guy who used to come late all the time, and she didn't really know how to handle it.  Then one day he came late, and I guess it was the straw that broke the camel's back, because she wrote him up and gave him some sort official university demerit, which was bad if you wanted to get future jobs on campus or something like that.  Unfortunately, I was also late that day and happened to walk in with this guy, as if were in let's-be-late cahoots (which we weren't), so she gave me a demerit too, even though I was almost always on time.  I was quite annoyed, but then the next day she gave me a hand-written letter apologizing for the demerit and telling me she had rescinded it.  It was all good after that.

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The following summer I decided I was going to live with friends in Seattle instead of at home with my parents.  I had a girlfriend at the time who had a little apartment on Queen Anne Hill, so I stayed with her at first, but it was pretty clear that that relationship wasn't going to last the summer (and it didn't), so I made a back up plan to sleep on a camping mat on a friend's floor.  I scored a "high-paying" construction gig -- $10 an hour, with frequent overtime -- which couldn't have fit me less, considering eighth-grade wood shop was the only class I had ever failed.  But I turned out to be a decent worker.  I got to the site on-time and did the things I could do -- sweeping, hauling, smashing, etc.  These were the things the regulars never wanted to do, because they deemed such menial tasks beneath them, so it worked out pretty well.

Our foreman was named Rick Wagner, and he was a terrible human being and a half-decent boss.  He was a burly, red-faced man with a well-groomed goatee, and a wavy mane of hair.  He was only 33, but a combination of smoking, drinking, and being in the sun all day gave him the affect of a man in his mid-50s.  He would throw out xenophobic, homophobic, and misogynistic comments on the regular.  He was a Trumpist before Trumpism was even a thing.  But he was very competent at his job, and he had a laudable sense of fairness that belied his general world views.  He hated immigrants.  He was constantly bitching about how the Mexicans were taking over construction and white people couldn't get decent manual labor jobs anymore.  (We didn't have a single Hispanic person on our crew, and it was 90% white, by the way.)  Yet, his favorite employee was a Vietnamese refugee named Dat.  Dat was a really good carpenter, and Rick doted on him as if he was his prized protege.  Dat was just there for the summer, like me, happy to make his $10-an-hour, like me, but Rick got corporate to give him a bump to $12-an-hour, just because he thought he deserved it.  It was interesting (and depressing) to see a person be convinced a horde of nameless, faceless immigrants was destroying the country, and then totally look past the concrete counterexample right before his eyes.

Rick used to give me grief sometimes for being a crap carpenter, but he was never really serious about it.  He knew it wasn't my bag.  He found out I was studying math, and I think he really respected it.  He seemed to have this vision of himself as a champion intellect who got sidetracked by mischief in his youth.  (I heard rumors he went to prison for selling drugs in his early twenties.)  He would always tell me how good he was at school before he became a "fuck up," and he prided himself at calculating measurements quickly in his head.  I would have interesting conversations with him and forget how he was, and then he would go on a rant about how all women are bitches and feminism ruined society, and couldn't help but remember again, and so I'd go do a job on the other side of the site and wait for the workday and the summer to be over.

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When I went back to school, I got a promotion to the Math Center.  This was a tutoring center for higher level mathematics.  I liked the job in that it was a prestigious position and I got to hang out with other math nerds, but the actual tutoring kinda sucked.  Most the students in there were so lost there was no way I could actually help them understand the concepts, so I would end up giving them strategies for "faking it" as best as possible (which is probably what they wanted anyway).  What I really wanted to say was, "You need to go back and retake the previous class and possibly the one before that and the one before that."  You'd have psych majors who had to take statistics, and they'd ask me about probability distributions, and they didn't even know how to subtract a larger number from a smaller one.  (This is a real example.  My roommate was a psych major, and I saw one of his tests once, and he had to solve this problem that boiled down to finding something like 23 - 55, and since the answer is a negative number, he didn't know how to do it.)  There's this thing in college mathematics where the majority of the students are woefully unprepared and don't really know what they are doing, but the professors just kinda go along with it and give everybody C's and B's, because the alternative would be failing half the class, which would be politically and socially untenable, and it might cause other majors to relax their math requirements, which would cripple the structure on which math departments are built.  Great system!

Anyway... my boss at the Math Center, to the extent I had one at all, was a professor named Dr. Vasher.  She was very cool.  She became a go-to for me anytime I needed a letter of recommendation.

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The next summer, Y2K, I moved back with my parents to save as much money as possible in anticipation of a semester abroad in Budapest, Hungary.  I got a job working at a huge sporting goods store.  I had two main tasks.  The first was stocking shoes before the store opened.  This required me waking up at 5:30 every morning which was brutal.  The opening manager, Dana, would go on a coffee run every morning, which sounds nice, but she only did it because she didn't want to do her actual job.  It was a running joke among the other employees how little she actually did.  The first day she asked me if I wanted coffee, and I said I did, so she asked me to give her a dollar, which I did, and she brought me back a coffee.  This went on for a few days, and then one day she didn't ask me.  When I got skipped again the next day, I initiated things and asked if she could get me a coffee -- she was still going to Starbucks everyday for everybody else anyway, why couldn't I get in on it anymore?  She got me a coffee, but very reluctantly, so I asked her what was up, and she said, "You only give me a dollar everyday, and the coffee is actually $1.20.  I'm always having to cover you twenty cents, and it's starting to add up."  Okay, but the only reason I gave her a dollar is because that's what she told me to give her.  So, from then on I gave her $1.20 everyday, and everything was good.  But I don't know why she didn't just tell me my coffee was more than a dollar as soon as it became an issue for her.  I'm still annoyed by that interaction and it was nearly twenty years ago.

Once the store opened, I would take a lunch break (at 10:00 am), and then go in the back and scan merchandise from the loading dock into the system.  The boss back there was this middle-aged bachelor named Jimmy, and he was a total tool, but I kinda liked him anyway.  He reminded me of the kid in high school who drove a Camaro with an awesome stereo system and always knew where the party was.  He never studied or played sports or really applied himself at anything at all, so now he worked at a sporting goods store and tried to bond with the coworkers half his age.  "Hey, man, we should hang out sometime.  Drink some beers, get some [hushed toned, looks around] *pussy*."  I never took him up on the offer.  Still, Jimmy was alright.  He would genuinely make me laugh with his ridiculous stories -- like the time he broke his hand while drunk trying to break wood pole on a bet -- but maybe not for the reason he thought, or maybe so.  It was hard to tell with Jimmy.  He blurred the line between irony and earnestness, between laughing with and laughing at.  Even now I haven't fully worked it out.

Well, that's it for today.  Maybe I'll do a Volume 3 at a future date, maybe not.

Until next time...  

Entry 460: Houses Bought and Sold

Hola, amigos.  I know it's been a while since I rapped at ya, but things have been crazy at the G&G household.  (Do you recognize this opening template?  It's from one of my favorite bygone columns in The Onion.)

We both bought and sold a house within the past three weeks.  If you live in most of America this might seem very fast; if you live in one of a handful of major cities (DC, NY, SF, Seattle, etc.) you are likely familiar with the whirlwind pace at which the housing market moves.  We put an offer on our new house two days after it was listed, before the seller even held an open house, and we sold our house within a week after it was listed, one day after we held an open house weekend.  In both cases, I feel like we hit the very edge of what's "fair."  I don't feel like we got a great deal on our new house, and I don't feel like we made a killing on our old house.  We basically sold our house for the exact amount needed to cover the down payment and most the ancillary expenses of our new house.  We broke even.  But we upgraded to a house we like better, so in that sense we came out ahead.  But then again the mortgage is more expensive, so... who knows?

I've found it quite difficult to figure out how much we made (or lost) off our house.  One answer is we just take the sales prices minus the amount we owe, and in that regard we did great.  But then we put some money into our house over the years -- we redid the bathroom, extended the kids' room, landscaped the yard, etc.  Do we factor that in?  Maybe, but we also got to enjoy these things for a while, which is worth something.  Also, how should we account for the rent we would have been paying if we didn't buy a house, and, again, the enjoyment that came with owning this particularly house in this particular neighborhood?   I don't know how it all works out.  What I do know is that as long as we can afford to make mortgage payments on our new place until global warming overtakes us all, we will be fine.

I'm (mostly) joking about the global warming thing, but I have been dreaming up ways in which everything can go wrong.  We haven't actually closed on either house, so until then, you never know.  The inspections are done, however, so that's good.  There's nothing fatally wrong with our house -- it's not built on a sinkhole, and there isn't a colony of endangered bees in our walls.  Weirdly, the original offer we agreed to didn't even have an inspection requirement.  I'm not sure why it didn't.  Maybe the buyers think inspections are a waste of money or maybe they thought the offer would be more attractive to us without it.  Whatever the case, it wasn't in the contract.

But one of the buyers (it's a family -- wife, husband, two kids -- just like us) works for DC, and she wanted this special loan for DC employees that requires an inspection, so they came back to us and said they wanted one.  We agreed under the condition that they couldn't break the original agreement based on the results of the inspection.  They said that was cool (I mean, it was either that or nothing), so we were "covered," but not really, because if there was truly something majorly wrong with the house -- something unfixable or something that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix -- they could just back out and eat the deposit, and then we would be stuck with an albatross house.  Likely scenario?  Of course not, but remember I'm dreaming up ways in which it can all go wrong.

Ultimately, however, my rational brain (along with S's) made the decision to allow the inspection.  There was just no reason to be such hardasses about it.  Sometimes you need to be a hardass lest you be taken advantage of, but this didn't seem like one of those cases.  It would have been preemptive hardassery, and I don't want to go through life so cynically.  And it all worked out, because they had the inspection yesterday, and they said there were only "minor" repairs needed, and as per our agreement, we don't need to do anything about them.  The truth of the matter is that we've kept our house in pretty good condition.  If I was moving into a house in the condition of our current house, I would be totally happy with it.

Alright, I think that's enough for now.  Hopefully be back soon.

Until next time...