moving: yep, still cursed

This move is the transaction that never ends. We closed on the house 7/24, and it’s now 9/2 and things are still in upheaval.

Exhibit 1: Last Friday, I opened a bill from our old phone/internet provider. I’ll call them Hairy-Hairy, in honor of Kit Brookside reminding me that “moving is a hairy-hairy.”  Hairy-Hairy had dutifully turned off our phone service on 7/24 and not turned off DSL service.

Here’s the backstory: we used to have phone and internet service through a provider I’ll call Horizon. My Patient Husband and I had email addresses through them, YourLovelyWeblogmistress@horizon.net and MyPatientHusband@horizon.net.  (Well, rough paraphrase.) Hairy-Hairy bought the phone/internet service in our area, and they were in process of transferring the email addresses over, but as it turned out, we moved back into Horizon territory. Horizon said they’d just take over our addresses again so nothing would change. And other than about two hours of outages and five phone calls to tech support, it happened smoothly. (Well, more smoothly than anything else happened, although I never heard a FIOS hookup tech say those kind of words before! We have a lot of trees on our property.)

At any rate, I called Hairy-Hairy and asked them WFH, and they said “Oopsie,” and agreed to cut off DSL service and cancel the bill. 

I know they did this because an hour later, my email service cut off.

You can see what happened here, right? I got on the phone with Horizon tech support (thank you, gethuman.com for providing the phone number) and said, “The short story is, my email is kaput. The long story is, this account is cursed.”

The very nice tech support guy from Horizon fixed it with no problem, and thankfully, I kept him laughing throughout the call because the Horizon computer thinks significantly slower than the tech support guy. Hairy-Hairy, in its infinite wisdom, had shut off my email address on the grounds that they used to own it, and therefore it deserved to die. Horizon easily turned it back on. The tech support guy suggested I should sprinkle my house with holy water, and then was surprised when I exclaimed, “I did!”

Exhibit 2: We got a phone call from the humorless attorney for our mortgage company. Remember how we signed 55,000 pieces of paper that day? (“This is lead paint.” “No, it’s a sheet of paper.”) Well, they missed one. She needed us to go find a notary and get the paper notarized because apparently the entire state would have to fold up and die if we don’t do this one more piece of paper.

I asked her what it was for, and she said it was for notarizing. I swear, I am not kidding. It was a notary sheet. It needs to be notarized. What’s it for? It’s for notarizing. And I could not get any more information from her than that. Cue me and Patient Husband trying to decide whether it’s worth antagonizing a humorless attorney and potentially getting her in trouble by dragging our feet on this. Then Kiddo#2 spattered it with green juice from a popsicle, and we had a good laugh. What we needed to do, we believe, was set a coffee cup right in the middle of it and leave a nice ring. That’s what this is worth in our opinion.

Now how much would you pay for an incompetent mortgage company? But wait! There’s more! You see, First Incompetency Mortgage Co. is a reseller of mortgages. You get your mortgage and within thirty seconds they sell it to someone else who will administrate your loan and kneecap you if you’re late. We were told which company it would be and to expect payment coupons for our September payment.

Guess who hasn’t gotten any payment coupons yet? That would be us.

My Patient Husband called the new company two weeks ago and asked for the coupon book, and they told us they hadn’t agreed to purchase the mortgage yet. Okay. Patient Husband remarked, “It doesn’t surprise me. They’ve screwed up everything on this transaction so far.”

We think this got back to First Incompetency Mortgage Co, because when he wrote to our loan officer there, the guy wrote back, in all caps, “THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOUR MORTGAGE!”

If you’re moving to Angelborough or Angeltown, boy have I got a nonrecommendation to you for a mortgage company.

On Friday, we received a letter from the reseller saying “We aren’t going to keep your mortgage,” but still no instructions on where to send the September payment, and they weren’t answering their phones.

Clearly I’m going to need to get an attorney involved and make mortgage payments into an escrow account. 

The house is lovely. The city is sweet. The transaction was cursed.