My eyes are crossing and I need to do a load of dishes. I hate when I'm this busy at 10:00pm.
Teddy romped at Marymoor with his best buddy today. He's on his bed under the coffee table groaning right now. I like that he finally got enough exercise. I'm getting to know some of the dogs by name there now. You know that song from the sitcom Cheers had it right. It's good to go where everybody knows your dog's name.
I didn't like Cheers all that well though. Are you even old enough to remember it? There were too many prickly characters. Diane was crazy, and not a good crazy. Norm drank too much and never got up to go to the bathroom, but I liked Norm. The mailman irritated me and don't even mention Frasier. The funny thing was that I liked Frasier better when he went off to have his own sitcom. Go figure.
I used to have time to watch TV. Now, I'm lucky to watch the movies that we get from the library for a week at a time.
Junk. I'm sorry, but I'm offering junk to you tonight. Can I do that for one more night? I promise I'll tell you some decent stories soon. I pinky swear. I'll get a contract drawn up for us to sign. Yes, I'll send a notary over to your house so you can sign it.
Chase didn't return my calls about the refinance today. Does that surprise you? They just know we're onto their scheme. I still can't believe we nearly walked into that trap. I need to complain about this some more. We were this close (I'm measuring with my thumb and forefinger) to losing $16,000 by refinancing with them. That's a shitload of money. (Sorry for the bad language, but I'm still mad.) And it was Chase! The thing that gets me is that this is a big, well-known bank! Do you have your money with Chase? I wouldn't.
"Those people are predators," Mike said this morning. 'Predators' is the actual word he used.
The funny thing is that I found out today that on our deed, my name is correct. Some idiot at the bank messed up when they entered my name on the contract. Ha!
Okay, I know I wasn't the one who found the $16,000 problem. Mike did, bless him. Yet, there is some part of me that feels, in hindsight, that the whole business with my name being wrong was the best thing that could have happened despite the fact that it was so annoying and stressful at the time.
Would we really have looked at this contract after we signed it? I know we have thirty days after signing any contract, but would we? Oh, we would have tried. It was 120 or so pages! Thats half a paperback.
I did that once, got buyer's remorse and went back on a contract. When I was just out of college, I bought a set of dishes at one of those Tupperware kind of parties. I got excited and signed a contract for $800! Well, the next morning, I realized I didn't need a nice set of dishes and it turned out that these dishes were pretty cheap. You know when dishes just doesn't have a good feel when they're sliding against each other? Nails on a chalkboard. Go try it. Take that set of porcelain that you inherited from your grandma or your mother-in-law, or in my case both and slide them around on each other. Then take the cheap crap you use every day and do the same thing. Do the cheap ones annoy you? So after I felt that grating sound, I called up right away and told the woman I'd bought them from that I wanted my money back. Oh, she was slimy. She tried to go back into the spiel all over again. The problem for her was that the spell was broken. I had woken up. I kept saying no and she kept at me for nearly an hour. Finally, she got mad and said that I'd misrepresented myself.
"Really?" I replied. "How?"
No answer. She was stuck. She tried to tell me that law about having 30 days to review a contract after you signed it didn't apply to what we were doing. I knew that it did. I finally agreed to meet her. I could hear her smiling. How is it that you can tell when someone is smiling?
I packed up those dishes, put the contract on top, and left for her office. It was nearly an hour's drive. It was a dingy office in a neighborhood full of warehouses. Oh, she had one nice conference room, but I could see a lot going on there. This is why she had all the sales pitches at people's homes. She buzzed me in when I arrived and smiled as she walked me to the one nice conference room. I put the big box down on the table, pulled out the contract, and ripped it in half.
The smile fell off her face.
I also told her that if she didn't refund my money, that VISA would. I love my VISA card for that. Then I walked out. I think I picked up that smile on my way.
I don't have to be nearly so dramatic these days. I'm just sitting here quietly in my house. The washer is running. Mike and Nick are asleep. And I have that very same smile on my face right now.
Thank you for listening, jb
Teddy romped at Marymoor with his best buddy today. He's on his bed under the coffee table groaning right now. I like that he finally got enough exercise. I'm getting to know some of the dogs by name there now. You know that song from the sitcom Cheers had it right. It's good to go where everybody knows your dog's name.
I didn't like Cheers all that well though. Are you even old enough to remember it? There were too many prickly characters. Diane was crazy, and not a good crazy. Norm drank too much and never got up to go to the bathroom, but I liked Norm. The mailman irritated me and don't even mention Frasier. The funny thing was that I liked Frasier better when he went off to have his own sitcom. Go figure.
I used to have time to watch TV. Now, I'm lucky to watch the movies that we get from the library for a week at a time.
Junk. I'm sorry, but I'm offering junk to you tonight. Can I do that for one more night? I promise I'll tell you some decent stories soon. I pinky swear. I'll get a contract drawn up for us to sign. Yes, I'll send a notary over to your house so you can sign it.
Chase didn't return my calls about the refinance today. Does that surprise you? They just know we're onto their scheme. I still can't believe we nearly walked into that trap. I need to complain about this some more. We were this close (I'm measuring with my thumb and forefinger) to losing $16,000 by refinancing with them. That's a shitload of money. (Sorry for the bad language, but I'm still mad.) And it was Chase! The thing that gets me is that this is a big, well-known bank! Do you have your money with Chase? I wouldn't.
"Those people are predators," Mike said this morning. 'Predators' is the actual word he used.
The funny thing is that I found out today that on our deed, my name is correct. Some idiot at the bank messed up when they entered my name on the contract. Ha!
Okay, I know I wasn't the one who found the $16,000 problem. Mike did, bless him. Yet, there is some part of me that feels, in hindsight, that the whole business with my name being wrong was the best thing that could have happened despite the fact that it was so annoying and stressful at the time.
Would we really have looked at this contract after we signed it? I know we have thirty days after signing any contract, but would we? Oh, we would have tried. It was 120 or so pages! Thats half a paperback.
I did that once, got buyer's remorse and went back on a contract. When I was just out of college, I bought a set of dishes at one of those Tupperware kind of parties. I got excited and signed a contract for $800! Well, the next morning, I realized I didn't need a nice set of dishes and it turned out that these dishes were pretty cheap. You know when dishes just doesn't have a good feel when they're sliding against each other? Nails on a chalkboard. Go try it. Take that set of porcelain that you inherited from your grandma or your mother-in-law, or in my case both and slide them around on each other. Then take the cheap crap you use every day and do the same thing. Do the cheap ones annoy you? So after I felt that grating sound, I called up right away and told the woman I'd bought them from that I wanted my money back. Oh, she was slimy. She tried to go back into the spiel all over again. The problem for her was that the spell was broken. I had woken up. I kept saying no and she kept at me for nearly an hour. Finally, she got mad and said that I'd misrepresented myself.
"Really?" I replied. "How?"
No answer. She was stuck. She tried to tell me that law about having 30 days to review a contract after you signed it didn't apply to what we were doing. I knew that it did. I finally agreed to meet her. I could hear her smiling. How is it that you can tell when someone is smiling?
I packed up those dishes, put the contract on top, and left for her office. It was nearly an hour's drive. It was a dingy office in a neighborhood full of warehouses. Oh, she had one nice conference room, but I could see a lot going on there. This is why she had all the sales pitches at people's homes. She buzzed me in when I arrived and smiled as she walked me to the one nice conference room. I put the big box down on the table, pulled out the contract, and ripped it in half.
The smile fell off her face.
I also told her that if she didn't refund my money, that VISA would. I love my VISA card for that. Then I walked out. I think I picked up that smile on my way.
I don't have to be nearly so dramatic these days. I'm just sitting here quietly in my house. The washer is running. Mike and Nick are asleep. And I have that very same smile on my face right now.
Thank you for listening, jb
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