Posts by Jonah

Dang it. WordPress has changed everything around again. I just spent five minutes trying to figure out how to add an entry. It’s like coming home at night to find all your furniture moved around. JUST LEAVE IT WHERE IT WAS ALREADY!

I’m complaining because this is about the fifth time they’ve done this.

Work has been going pretty well. This week I closed my very first file that I’d worked beginning to end, all the way from recording the Notice of Default to the sale. It made me happy, although it’s one of those sad foreclosures; the borrowers had written us long handwritten letters with check stubs attached. We’d forwarded them to the loan company, but they told us to proceed anyway.

I much prefer the ones where all the letters we send come back, VACANT scribbled on them. Then we’re doing the neighborhood a favor.

The one I’d closed was in Texas, which has laws that allow you to foreclose really quickly. I’ve got other sales that won’t happen until December and some that I haven’t even been able to set a sale date yet. Each state is different.

Which has caused me some problems. I didn’t realize that I was supposed to be including a certain sheet in some recorded documents (because no one had bothered to tell me) until recently, which meant that I had to rerecord stuff and reset sale dates. Generally, that’s not a real problem unless the loan company asks you what the hold up is and you have to do your best to explain the delay.

Lately, my biggest delay has been checks. The boss writes the checks, but she’s only been doing it twice a month or so. This is really problematic when you’re waiting on a check to send with your documents to record. This week I finally got some checks but not the ones I desperately needed to send my Notice of Defaults off to get recorded, so I went in to see the boss and said, “You’ve got more checks to give me, right?”

“Yep,” she answered, not looking up. Sure enough I got a pile of checks an hour later. Unfortunately, the ones I really needed still weren’t there.

I wasn’t sure what to do, but then one of the girls who had been out last week came in and plopped a pile of checks on my desk. “These are yours.” The boss isn’t very careful about sorting everyone’s checks, and a whole pile of mine had ended up on my coworker’s desk. Of course, she’d been out of the office, and then she’d been catching up on her work. Paying the newspaper and title companies are a lower priority than making sure you meet your day to day deadlines, so she hadn’t gotten to them until later in the week. I was thrilled to get the checks I needed and noted with despair that they’d been written a week prior. In the meantime, I’d had to tell the loan servicing company why the sale date hadn’t been set yet through the online system (we don’t actually get to talk to any real people). Fortunately, I had a really good reason why we were running later than they thought we should be–they’d been pokey sending us the documents we needed to start the process. Still I would have liked to have started these files in JUNE, for crying out loud.

So I happily sorted through my new pile of checks, quickly setting sale dates and printing out the Notices, hoping to get them out in time for when the FedEx guy came.

That’s when one of my checks disappeared.

It just vanished. I had the stub and my check request stapled together and bracketed into the file, but the check itself was gone. It will turn up, I told myself, and proceeded to finish everything else on my desk, cleaning up as I went.

It was still missing.

I started going through all the files I had open. I even went and opened one of the FedEx envelopes I had put in the basket to go out, wondering if I’d put it in there by mistake. I crawled around on the floor. I picked everything off my desk and looked under it. I started going through my files page by page or turning them upside down and shaking them.

It was nowhere.

I briefly considered crying and then realized that wouldn’t help in this situation at all. Instead, I wrote out another check request and put it on the boss’ desk. I might not start this file till August. The thought crossed my mind that while this turn of events made me very sad, it might be making the borrowers pretty happy. They’d get to stay in their house an extra month.

Because of this I was late coming home. Berck was furious. We were going to a concert, and I hadn’t left us much time for dinner beforehand. As it turned out, we had a good dinner if rushed, and got good seats. He was off the next day, so I took the day off too.

The day after that, I was back in the office. I opened one of the files that I’d just sent off for recording to call and make sure my documents had arrived okay.

There was the check.

I’d looked in this file four times, I could have sworn, but there it was, plain as day. Gleefully, I filled out the Notice of Default and put it and the check in a FedEx envelope to go out.

The next day I had a message from the online loan servicing system. “File on hold. Confirm file on hold.” I called and told the folks at the other end not to record the document I’d just sent them. I’d probably be sending another one soon.

But to definitely hang on to that check.

Maybe those borrowers are happy. Maybe they don’t even know.

Last night Berck was in the bathroom for a while examining his face. He came out and held up a finger to me. “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

I couldn’t see anything, so I guessed, “A grey whisker?”

“Yes. I apparently have a lot of them, but I didn’t know what they were at first. I’ve also got a lot of grey on my temples. I don’t think I’m ready to be old.”

“Uh huh.”

“Wait! I’m not old! I’m not even 30 yet!”

One of these days I’ll stop dreaming about work. It happens eventually.

I keep waking up and saying to myself, “Stop it! You’re not actually getting anything done!” Of course, with dreams, it’s all a little off, like I have to send off foreclosure notices in the proper way at the proper time, and apparently by karaoke. Or messenger balloon.

Last night I finally started dreaming about an old abandoned windmill along the Santa Fe Trail that NASA had augmented and was available for camping in.

Some researchers believe that dreams are our brains’ way of categorizing the information we gathered during the day. Maybe I won’t stop having these dreams until I know my job inside and out.

I hope it happens soon. I keep waking up feeling even more exhausted than when I went to bed. I’ve also had a week-long headache.

This morning I awoke surprised to find my jaw aching but without a migraine (usually the jaw ache triggers one). Also odd was that my jaw only hurt on my right side. I felt it and realized by lymph node was very swollen and was really tender to the touch.

It isn’t nearly as tender now. Maybe I’m fighting swine flu.

Maybe I’ll figure out what I’ve got tonight in my dreams.

In other news, when Berck finally gets laid off, he should qualify for three months of unemployment benefits. So we should be able to survive for a while.

Luck is real, and you make your own, according to various studies. I’ve always considered myself a lucky person.

I like to drink herbal tea during my work day, but didn’t think to take any with me to my new job, and . My new office (Sara’s old one) has all of Sara’s old stuff in it still–meaningless (to me) notes covering the bulletin board, crossed out reminders on the huge wall calendar (including the ominous “Getting Married, Back May 24”), a half empty carton of diet Dr Pepper. And inside one of the file drawers, tucked next to a bunch of folders, was a box of Celestial Seasonings Apple Spice tea.

My office has a big window that opens to the rest of the office. It has blinds, but it seems a little silly to pull them. If I open the office door all the way, however, the door covers most of the window. My doorway faces the butt of a wall, so you have to be walking right by my office to look in and see me. So I am at my most private with my door completely open.

The boss is apparently cold-natured and keeps the office pretty hot. Fortunately, my office comes with a fan. And my window opens. I was a little worried about all the traffic noise coming in (we’re on the busiest street in the city), but it turns out that because of the direction my door opens, you can’t really hear it in the rest of the office. Once summer comes, I think I’ll enjoy the climate controlled air.

My boss is high strung and seems to like that I’m–apparently–even keeled. She loves to laugh, though, and that keeps things lighthearted.

She had to leave early today for an appointment. After she left, the receptionist, who has an office on one side of the open center office area, and the bankruptcy girl, who has an office on the other, called each other on the intercom function on the phone system and sat in their offices gossiping with each other. If you stood in the middle, you could hear both sides of the conversation quite clearly. This amused me very much.

Have you even sent a certified letter and watched the postman carefully put the certified stickers on your envelope and thought that might be fun to do? Well, I get to do that every day. Actually, I have an assistant to do all my mailings and copies for me, but I do them if she’s busy helping someone else.