Few things make me angrier than incompetence. I can show grace in most situations most of them time, but when someone is intentionally, or through sheer ineptitude, incompetent, it makes my blood boil. If you know what your job is and you’re capable of doing it, but don’t… I can’t take it!
Want some examples?
How about the payroll department who first forgot to put me back on payroll when I returned to work after Abi was born, then, when I complained, over-paid me by 56 hours then, over the weekend, sent me a letter asking when I would send them the money back. How about never? That money was payment to me for you being stupid.
Or then there’s our bank in Canada, who stopped submitting credit information to the Credit Bureau when we left the country. Yup, for over 2 years we’ve been dutifully paying off our student and car loan, and during that whole time the bank didn’t once update our credit. We go to buy a house, and for all intents and purposes it appears like we haven’t paid our creditors for two years! That looks real good on the mortgage application.
Even better is the system my employer has in place to verify my employment to a lender. They will not release to me any information about my own employment. I have to send the lender to a website, with a company code and my Social Security Number, where they can pay $15 to get a piece of paper that says I work here! I’m sure the mortgage brokers are just going to line up to pay money to get me to pay them money — especially when all the Canadian banks think we’re dead beats who don’t pay our bills.
Don’t even get me started on the cell phone companies we had to deal with this weekend.
Anyway, we’re not as screwed as it sounds. We were able to prove that we pay our bills by showing our mortgage broker our statements. That those statements don’t correlate to what Canada’s credit authority has on file is really only a matter of paperwork. If I can figure out how to get through to someone at our bank who has the authority to do anything, we’ll be able to get it straightened out. And there are other ways to verify my employment… just as long as I don’t count on say… my employer to help me at all.
Once its all sorted out, our position actually is pretty strong for buying a house. We’re able to swing a $270,000 mortgage, but thats a little more than we’re comfortable with. We’re shopping in the $230-240k range, which is a slightly nicer market than where we originally looking. There’s a lot more paperwork to push and many more incompetent people to yell at deal with, but we’re making good progress so far.
On another topic, I’ve long wished for a park near where I work that I could spend my lunch hours at. There’s actually a nature preserve behind my office, but I found out shortly after I took my first walk through it that its infested with lyme disease-carrying ticks, so I don’t spend much time there. Then today, after nearly 2 and a half years of working here, I randomly turned right into a skinny driveway on my way back from lunch and discovered this.
Its beautiful and peaceful and quiet. In short, the perfect place to hide out at lunch time and read a book. Too bad I’m leaving in a month.
Nic and the kids are doing well, and getting things done on their end. We’ll have new contact info shortly for those interested.
It looks lovely, but then Mom and I have always liked the state of New York. It has a terrible reputation, I know, but it is undeserved. The Finger Lake district is just lovely, and the Lake Champlain area down near where you live is nice as well. Travelling there is so much easier than in Ontario and with the beaverbuck at par, quite affordable. I don’t know why more Canadians don’t visit.
wow that sucks! and where is that park? i wanna go. your payroll department sucks! you would think that at a huge company like ge they would have some things done right in payroll. guess not.
i leave for mexico on saturday am. you can come over anytime you like before then and untill you leave for dinner or to just hang out. seriously.. just call and say you are coming. 🙂
ttyl