Don't Tread on Me: Gearing Up to Take on "Big Phone" and "Big Water"

I am the victim of advancing technology. Evidently AT&T in my neck of the woods is upgrading to a fiber optics scheme of some sort. I don't know enough about such things to calculate whether this project will translate into anything positive for me or not. I haven't had a land-line phone since moving to Greenville. I do use AT&T DSL for my Internet access. No clue as to whether AT&T's tinkering about will enhance my Web uplink. It certainly hasn't so far.

In bringing the 21st century to the unwashed, AT&T has dug up my yard no less than four times in the past 12 months. I now have a big ugly green terminal box situated next to the big ugly utility pole that is located in the setback about mid-way along my front yard. Every two or three months, AT&T shows up to excavate a trench that runs from the side street (I have a corner lot) to this terminal box, and then from the terminal box down my side yard to one of the two, new big ugly terminal boxes they have installed in the front yard of the neighboring house behind me. It's quite the operation with all manner of trucks, trailers and backhoes parked in my yard and along the side street.

AT&T doesn't do this work itself, but contracts it out to some private vendor. In what can only be classified as blatantly stupid, AT&T pays these guys to come back again and again to dig the same trench in the same spot and lay more line, cable or whatever in the hell they are laying. When they are finished, they fill in the hole and scatter some straw over the whole mess. Meanwhile my yard is rutted and pitted from all the equipment that has been parked in it.

They were here last about six weeks ago. As usual, they were digging up the same trench. I returned from the gym to find a geyser of water spraying about 40 feet into the air. These geniuses had punctured the water main. Water was gushing into the tops of the pine trees in my side yard and flowing like the Colorado River down the side street where it came to rest pooling in people's front yards. Eventually the side street assumed the role of water-soaked parking lot containing the vehicles of a couple of AT&T supervisors, two Greenville Water Company trucks (one towing its own backhoe), a county sheriff's car and a fire truck. A EMT ambulance and a sanitation truck would have rounded out the collection.

The water company employees finally got things under control and the water flow stopped. They excavated a huge hole in my side yard to fix the violated pipe. This was halfway filled in when they finished. They then taped it all off with yellow "police" tape and left it. Thus it sits today. Neither AT&T nor the water company has returned to finish the job. Tic toc, tic toc....

With the hubbub of the holidays and my natural propensity toward inaction, I have yet to address the issue; but with every passing day I am growing more frustrated. Obviously, this isn't going to be resolved on its own. I am going to be forced to act. I'm sure once I begin making calls, I will embark on a round robin with AT&T and the water company as each points the finger at the other. I can hardly wait.

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AFC Playoffs: What Me Worry?

I get to relax this weekend; the Steelers aren't playing. By beating the Browns last week, they earned the advantage of sitting out the first round of playoff games. That's an extra week to rest up, layout a strategy for their game the following week, and to mentally prepare.

I will pay attention to this week's AFC games with little more than a passing interest. I don't think it really matters which team moves forward from the Jets-Colts match-up. Although it's true that any team can beat any other team on a given day, the chances of either the Colts or Jets beating the Patriots the following week are slim at best. Likewise, unless something goes terribly wrong for Baltimore, the Steelers will face the Ravens in two weeks. I suspect Baltimore is the team the Steelers are preparing to play.

When the Steelers faced the Ravens in the playoffs in 2008 on their way to winning Super Bowl 43, the pundits made much of the fact that Pittsburgh had already beaten Baltimore twice during the regular season, and it would be very difficult for them to pull off a hat trick against a very formidable Raven's team. So much for conventional wisdom. No telling what those same pundits will offer up this year with the Ravens and Steelers splitting their two regular season meetings. It is worth noting here, though, that in the first Steelers-Ravens game -- the one the Ravens won -- Rothlisberger had yet to rejoin the team, and Steelers kicker Jeff Reed, who suddenly developed two left feet this season, was still on the roster.

Regardless of the outcome of the coming playoff game, it is going to be a very physically beat-up winner that faces the Patriots. The Ravens-Steelers game will be a slugfest of the first order.

I am feeling pretty good about Pittsburgh's chances. This team seems to be peaking, and just at the right time. It looks like starting defensive end Aaron Smith will be back in the lineup for the first time since the beginning of the season. Polamalu is healthy. The prospect of his coming nuptials seem to be having a positive impact on Big Ben. He had a hell of a game last Sunday. Perhaps some stability in his love life is just what he needed.

So, I am going to kick back and relax this weekend as the AFC playoff picture sorts itself out. But for the Steelers, I think the road to the Super Bowl is through the Patriots and the road to the Patriots is through the Ravens.

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Technology: Garbage In, Garbage Out

The grand experiment is over. I have met the enemy and been kicked in the keister. Technology 117; Russ 0.

I have resisted upgrading to a Smartphone of some kind because I don't feel the need to "stay dialed in" with e-mails and such. I don't recreate on my PC or netbook; I'm sure not going to do it on my phone. I don't play games or goof-off on my computers. If I'm online, I'm researching a story or answering e-mails. I am content to have a phone that makes and receives calls without dropping them, and that has a full keyboard for texting. I rarely use the camera function. So when one of my nieces surprised me on Christmas with an Android-based media tablet, I was excited, seeing it as an opportunity to leap ahead into the world of apps. I was going to join the "dialed in."

My leap turned into a faltering stumble.

One thing I was eager to do was download the Nook app from Barnes and Noble. After logging a number of longer trips last year -- several to California, one to Hawaii, and another to Barbados -- I realized I can lighten my load by carrying along a reader of some type rather than two or three books to get me through these mini Odysseys. But no soap. The Nook app wouldn't load.

In fact, after several hours of trying on a variety of app sites, I was unable to download a single app of any sort. My blood pressure elevated to stroke-inducing numbers, and my frustration level growing to the point that I was ready to kick the crutch out from under Tiny Tim, I toiled away red faced.

Of course the instruction manual was no help. Simply listing the steps required to download an app, it didn't bother to provide any clue about what to do if an app won't download. The manufacturer's Web site is equally vague, lacking any troubleshooting hints, or even a serious customer service contact.

Like so many manufacturers of today's high-tech gadgets, this one takes the attitude that if a consumer buys its product, he certainly should already know how to operate it. My intuition fails somewhere between flipping a light switch and setting the clock on a VCR.

Surfing the Internet looking for anyone with the same tablet, experiencing the same issues also failed to throw any light on the subject. At this point I have no idea if the problem is operator error -- not out of the question -- or a malfunction of the tablet.

Unwilling to invest any additional time or energy into this endeavor, I am returning the tablet from whence it came. I really prefer turning pages anyway.

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North American International Auto Show: Detroit in Winter! Are You Nuts?

It's been a few years since I last attended the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS). Most sane folks shorthand that to the Detroit Auto Show; most motoring journalists contract it even further to simply Detroit. As the press days of the show creep closer and one journalist asks another, "Are you doing Detroit?" It is a given that he isn't inquiring about summer vacation plans. Nope, it's the auto show; and it's not summer, but blustery January. Burrrr....Look, my hand is stuck to the taxi's trunk lid.

My last three-day sentence at the Detroit show was in 2004. Gloomy skies, temperatures in the single digits or low teens, gray slush-covered sidewalks and cold shuttle rides from the hotel to Cobo Hall are memories burned into my soul.

It wasn't all bad. Fortunately at the time I worked for a guy who rarely planned ahead. I was working for AMI Auto World magazine; it was a given that we were going to send a contingent to Detroit. There were no approvals needed from AMI's looney CEO that held up the planning. The only question: Who among the staff would make the trek from Boca Raton, Fla. to the jewel of Lake Michigan? My boss never rendered this decision until a week or two before the show.

As managing editor, it fell to me to see to it that all the travel arrangements were made. This was a task made easier because AMI had an in-house travel agency. Flights were booked with a 15 sec phone call to an office down the hall. Of course, we usually paid more because my boss procrastinated, but AMI was a company that wallowed in waste; who were we to rock the boat?

The real benefit to the late planning was that by the time I was given the go-ahead to book hotel rooms, all the "inexpensive" hotels were full. While our peers, who planned ahead, stayed in the Hilton, Marriott or Airport Quality Inn, we luxuriated in the Four Seasons. If you have to go to Detroit in January, the Four Seasons at least makes it bearable.

Sure, you might conclude that attending the Detroit show press days is exciting, but you would be wrong. Yes, it's a gathering of most of the movers and shakers in the auto industry; and yes, many new or redesigned models are unwrapped; and yes, all-new concepts are revealed; however, very little of this matters because the opportunities to get up close and personal with any of it are few. Getting credentialed and attending the show's press days are no guarantee that you are going to benefit in any way other than to say, "I was there."

Each year the show's administrators laud the huge turnout of "journalists" attending its media days. Somehow they believe this is a good thing. Historically around 5,000 or more so-called journalists are credentialed and show up for the media preview that used to last three days, but has been reduced to two. That's 5,000 plus people stampeding from one 10-min or so press conference to the next one located somewhere on the other side of Cobo Hall. A manufacturer planning for such a press conference -- most have one whether or not they have anything of substance to show or announce -- typically has 200 or 300 folding chairs set up in front of its stage for the media to use. The other 4,700 people stand behind the chairs. It's like being in the pit of a Lady Gaga concert.

If you are lucky you can hear the press conference because you stand damn little chance of actually seeing it. Whatever hand outs, press kits or giveaways are available are gone before half the journalists work their way to the front to try to get them.

At Auto World, we always tag-teamed the press conferences. Each of us was assigned specific manufacturers and we hopscotched to about every third conference. We usually even managed to secure a seat. Journalists on their own, trying to cover the entire show, were not so lucky. Today, I would be one of those poor schmucks.

I haven't been to the Detroit show since leaving Auto World in 2004. I don't miss it. If a manufacturer invited me, paying my expenses, I would probably go again. But spending my own money to go to Detroit in winter to attend an event with little benefit to my business just makes no sense to me.

I'm happy to do what most of you do: I'll follow this circus on the Internet.

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Twilight Zone: The Future in Black and White

Syfy Channel treated us to a refresher course in the Twilight Zone over the New Year's holiday. With little besides time on my hands these days and fresh TV programming virtually nonexistent during the holidays, I stumbled on Syfy's nearly 48-hour marathon of the early 60s anthology series quite by accident. Some accidents are gifts; this was one of them.

As a kid, I don't remember Twilight Zone as appointment TV in my house. Despite the fact there were probably only one or two other programs to choose from at whatever time slot the series played, I don't remember the family assembling in the living room and jockeying for the most advantageous vantage points from which to best see our 21-inch black-and-white Philco television -- a routine that was repeated for must-see shows such as Have Gun Will Travel, People's Choice, Ed Sullivan and The Danny Thomas Show.  But I do recall watching several episodes, and have vivid memories of two or three of them.

Ah, the miracle of the DVR. Because I have DVR capability with my cable plan, I rarely watch anything in real time. I record and watch later, skipping over the commercials. I scrolled down through the 70 or 80 episodes scheduled and cherry-picked a few to record. Based on either my fond recollection of a particular episode, guest stars in a certain episode or just the description of the story, I chose about 15 episodes to record. I finished watching them last night.

Was Twilight Zone great television? Not really. At a time when much of TV drama consisted of mini-stage plays shot in front of a camera, it was pretty standard fare from a production-quality standpoint. Certainly Rod Serling's on-camera introductions are legendary and the sci-fi storylines were unique to the day. But most episodes consisted of actors delivering pages of dialog to one another as they stood or sat in place. Yawn.

Among my two favorite episodes, and ones that I remember from seeing the original broadcasts: William Shatner on an airplane sees a Bigfoot-like thing on the wing and tries to convince his wife and the crew that he's not nuts; and Burgess Meredith as a timid bank employee, who spends his lunch hour every day in the bank's vault reading, escapes a nuclear holocaust and is the last person in earth. The Bigfoot-on-a-plane-wing episode gave me nightmares for months.

What I do find remarkable about that original Twilight Zone series is the quality of the pool of guest actors. It was a virtual who's who of future movie and television stars. A few of the notables not already mentioned: Robert Redford, Leonard Nimoy, Charles Bronson, Jack Klugman, John Astin, Bill Bixby, Carol Burnett, Johnathan Winters, James Coburn, Burt Reynolds, Robert Cummings, Andy Devine (I can't write, read or say, Andy Devine, without smiling), Robert Duvall, Ron Howard, Cloris Leachman, and Cliff Robertson.

Twilight Zone may not have been great television, and anyone below the age of 40 would probably find it unwatchable; but for someone who grew up with it, watching a few old episodes was a great way to waste away a few hours over an uneventful holiday weekend.

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Winter Blahs: Postponing the Inevitable

Returning to my routine for the first time after New Year's Day is by far the most disheartening reoccurring experience of my many years. As wretched as my life has been during a few sporadic periods along the way, somehow I have always been able to put my worries and troubles on the back burner for the three or four weeks spanning the Christmas and New Year season. That first bite of reality after New Year's Day, however, always brought the negatives screaming back with a crash and a bang.

I suppose it's the long stretch from January 2nd until, well, summer's portal, Memorial Day, that creates such an intense sense of dejection in me. It's a long, dry spell of holiday-free weeks that rapidly turn a routine into a rut. Yep, I despise that first weekday after January 1. Can you tell? I'm not particularly happy today.

Adding to my cheerlessness is the inevitable end to the NFL season. Even in those more recent dark years when the Steelers underperformed -- let's call them the Mike Tomczak/Kordell Stewart/Tommy Maddox/Bill Cowher-lost-grip-on-reality years -- I was saddened to see the season draw to a close. Years when the Steelers made it to the playoffs, prolonged the season for me and therefore thankfully postponed my discontent.

Here I am once again sitting at my keyboard on the first official workday after New Year's Day and the regular NFL season has ended. I am buoyed by the Steelers effortless beat-down of the Browns yesterday. It was the best the offense played all year. That they get to sit out next week's clashes, providing an extra week to prepare, lifts my heart.

I am glad to have the distraction of the playoffs to divert my attention away from the fact that it is winter and a damn long haul to Memorial Day. I am hoping for a brief respite from the ho-hum with a St. Paddy's Day trip to South Florida, but too soon to tell.

Who knows, the Steelers may cause me to put off the worst of my winter blahs until February 7th. Now wouldn't that be something?

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Selling My House in Florida: The Reprint of a Golden Oldie

I've had a few (very few, really, but enough to act) requests for a reprint of my classic e-mail regarding the sale of my home in Florida. Here it is in all of its unvarnished glory:

Free at last; free at last; thank God Almighty, I’m free at last!

Just had the closing on my house. I feel 500 pounds lighter. I do now believe in miracles. I’m not alone. My real estate attorney Brenda, who also owns the title company where the closing took place, now refers to this as the Santa Claus Closing.

In case you run out of steam part way through digesting this opus, I’ll give you the moral of the story up front: You just never know where that buyer is coming from.

I was sitting in my recliner late on Sunday afternoon, Feb. 4^th, watching a DVD and sipping some chardonnay. I was nattily attired in a pair of old, stretched-out gym trunks. My cell phone rang. I hear a very heavily-accented voice ask something about the house on Longmeadow. I’m like, yes, it’s for sale. The Hispanic accent replies something about, look at it. I roll my eyes, take a slug of Meridian Chardonnay and tell the voice that he is welcome to look at the house and when would he like to do that. “Now, now,” he says, “I in driveway with customer.” It’s a real estate agent from down south someplace. I tell him to wait a minute, throw on a tee-shirt and go to the door.

There I find Mauricio, the “English is my second language and I don’t know diddly about selling real estate” real estate agent with a forty-something couple fresh off the boat or bus or whatever from Uruguay who also no speak-a the English. I’m thinking, “I interrupted Wedding Crashers for this?” But being the gracious individual you all know me to be, I invite them in.

They spend all of 10 minutes looking around inside, outside, around the pool and hot tub and in the garage. I’m not kidding; it took no more than 10 minutes. On their way out of the house the husband approaches me and asks, “What about my butt?” I say, “Excuse me?” He says, “What about my butt?” I scrunch up my face and study his lips and try again, “What?” He’s becoming a little frustrated. “WHAT ABOUT MY BUTT?” giving it another go – a little slower and louder. Finally Mauricio, the great communicator, wades in, “He asking about boat.” “Oh, oh, a boat!” Now we’re all on the same page. “There is no neighborhood association,” I tell him as he looks back at me with all the comprehension of a kitten being told to stay off the sofa, “so no problem there, but I don’t know what the county rules are.” “Keep in side yard,” he says. “No problemo,” I respond, “You can do whatever you want behind the fence. Believe me, I do.”

With that the couple smiles and leaves. Mauricio hangs back and says, “I’ll fax offer in morning.” I’m like, sure you will. Adios, muchacho and don’t run into anything on your drive back to Miami. I go back to Vince Vaughn and my wine. Forty-five minutes later my phone rings and it’s a young girl asking for my fax number in refreshingly fluent English. I don’t have a fax machine. Well, I do. I inherited Amy’s old printer/fax when her company replaced it, but I’ve never hooked up the fax end of it or tried it out. I tell the kid to hold on, call Amy and get her fax number. I give the kid the number and still don’t hold much hope. I mean, they hadn’t had the opportunity to talk among themselves while here to convey to the agent any real interest in making an offer. We hadn’t discussed price – as if that would have been possible – or anything of real import about the house. We had established he could keep his butt in the side yard behind the fence and that was the extent of our negotiations. Yet, I was as giddy as a school girl trying on her prom dress.

I alerted Amy that a fax could be coming and to keep her eye on her fax machine. Monday passes without a fax arriving. On Tuesday morning I attempt to e-mail Mauricio at the address on his card. The e-mail is returned as undeliverable. Figures. I write them off as Dade County kooks and basically give up on receiving an offer.

Late Wednesday morning I get a call from Amy: The faxed offer has landed. Expecting a low-ball offer on my asking price, I inquire as to the amount of the offer and Amy tells me it’s $4,500 more than list. I am dumbfounded. I leave work on my lunch hour, er, half hour and run up to her house to fetch it. My euphoria rapidly evaporates when I read the contract a bit more closely and discover that indeed the offer is $4,500 more, but the buyer is getting $12,000 handed back to him to cover closing costs, points, and etcetera. So the offer is really $7,500 below my asking price. This still isn’t bad considering I was going to drop the price another $10,000 the following week.

The contract was nearly illegible. It looked as though Mauricio had fallen into a mud puddle with it on his way home from real estate school. I contacted my friend Kimba (I owe you dinner, Kimba), who is a real estate agent, and asked if she would take a look at it. I faxed it to her and she called to say there were several problems with it, not the least of which Mauricio had listed a selling agent on the contract who would suck up another nine or ten large from my equity. This is a FSBO deal. It turned out that the selling agent listed was the guy I paid $300 to to list the house on MLS. This problem was easily addressed, but there were others.

Problems needed addressing, but how to accomplish that? Other than requesting “una mas cervaza” or “Donde es el banyo?” my Spanish is nil. So I call my buddy Jose, who enjoys nothing more than jacking up a salesperson whether it’s at Best Buy or the Jeep dealership, and he is more than happy to play translator/seller representative/hammer.

Hose gets Mauricio on the phone, explains who he is and why he is calling. Mauricio is relieved to have the language barrier breached and tells Hose that the $12,000 isn’t going into anyone’s pocket, but is to cover closing costs. Jose asks, all the closing costs? “Si” is the answer. Even Russ’ closing costs? “Si.” Hmmm…

Other areas of the contract, such as timeline provisions, hadn’t been filled in. Over the phone, Mauricio said there was no problem; they would essentially follow whatever timeline I dictated as well as taking my lead on other unresolved issues. Jose then put me in contact with the real estate attorney he had secured to help with the sale of his house that is also on the market. It turns out Brenda offers her services for free if a seller uses her title company for the closing. Free certainly fell within the parameters of my budget.

I faxed her the contract. She raised questions on several issues. The most crucial was that this was a 100-percent financing deal and almost no lender was doing those in the 2006 market. Now it’s a U.N. showdown. The attorney would ask me for clarification on some issue. I’d call Jose. He in turn would then call Mauricio. Mauricio would call the buyer. Mauricio would call Jose back. Jose would call me. I’d call the attorney. This happened three or four times. If you ever played telephone as a kid in which something is whispered from person to person down a line of several kids, you have some sense of how well this worked.

Likewise different copies of the contract began flying back and forth. At one point the selling price was up to $10,500 more than the asking price with a 6-percent closing cost disbursement to the buyer. At this juncture Brenda said, based on 18 years in the business, there was no way this deal was ever going to close and maybe I should walk away. “Snowball’s chance in hell,” I think was said more than once. I explained to Brenda that after the house being on the market for five months that this might not be the prettiest girl in the room, but she was the only one dancing with me. I wanted to press ahead, roll the dice and take my chances.

Jose would have a conversation with Mauricio. Mauricio sounded as though he understood and I’d get another version of the contract more screwed up than the previous one. Jose quipped at one point that this guy was as dumb in Spanish as he was in English. Meanwhile the attorney is digging in her heels and becoming more insistent in her demands. She finally had had enough and faxed him off a bullet-point memo outlining what should be included in the contract. I’m sure at this point old Mauricio wished he had taken his mother’s advice and become a chili pepper farmer. I know I was wishing I had stayed a renter.

Two days of playing rope-a-dope taking head punches, Mauricio was about to throw in the towel and take his customers elsewhere. Exasperated, I sat at my computer very early Friday morning and wrote an item-by-item list of how I wanted each section of the contract completed. I contractually stipulated my closing costs would be paid by the buyer. We put a firm closing date into the contract. I would retain possession of the house for 15 days after the closing (I wasn’t going to take this risky flight of fancy without some sort of parachute), and a few other blurry items were more clearly defined. I faxed the list off to Mauricio, called Jose and asked him alert Mauricio it was coming, and waited. In fifteen minutes a signed contract, including all my provisions, was faxed back. It was also faxed to the attorney who still wasn’t real happy with it, but said it was probably about as good as we were going to get. She also moderated her original opinion, saying it could possibly close, but not without some pain and anguish. It was wobbly as all get out, but a signed contract nonetheless. We were in business.

Through Jose and Mauricio, the buyer asked if he could come by on Sunday to show the house to his kids. Sure. Around 5:30 the entire Bruno clan lands at Casa de Heaps. It’s the buyers, their two teenage kids, and Grandma and Grandpa, who despite having lived in this country for 10 years, also don’t speak the language. They descend on my house like the seventh plague. They scatter and I give up trying to keep my eye on everything. Trying to use Mauricio as a translator, Grandpa is asking if I’ll throw my furniture into the deal. He and Mauricio then open the front door and look at the door jam and have a 30-sec conversation. Mauricio looks at me and asks (I swear I’m not making this up.) if the house is wood or concrete block. Those of you familiar with my house know that there is no way it could be confused with a concrete block home, particularly by a real estate sales professional. I guess professional is the operative word. And obviously this had never come up in any previous conversations. “It’s frame,” I say. “Que?” “It’s all wood – sticks, lumber,” I try again using the shotgun approach and hoping some word hits home. “Okay,” was all that was said. Twenty minutes after they arrived, they were gone.

The appraisal also proved to be a hurdle when Mauricio tried two or three Dade County appraisers, all of whom said the house couldn’t appraise at more than $12,000 less than the contracted price. Through Jose, I told Mauricio they were full of caca and there wasn’t a house in the neighborhood that had sold for less than the contracted price in the past three years and some for a heck of a lot more. Find a Palm Beach Country appraiser, I suggested. He eventually did and the house appraised out just fine.

Although by contract the buyer only had five days to bring in an inspector and back out of the contract based on what might be found, the inspector showed up on day 14 of this ordeal. Of course, this was another product of Dade County. The mom and daughter buyers showed up with him. When I bought the house, the inspector spent nearly two hours going over every square inch. He marked electric outlets with the polarization reversed, he brought a ladder and climbed up on the roof, he rang the doorbell, ran the garage door up and down, flushed the toilets and ran the automatic lawn sprinklers. This guy did none of that. The inspection took all of 25 minutes. He did ask how to turn on the light in the pool, but that was the only question he asked. The three of them walked around chattering away. As he was leaving he shook my hand, complimented me on the house and said, “No problems.” I wanted to yell, “What about this?” and point a couple of things out to him, but restrained myself. Somehow I had been blessed with an inspector every bit as incompetent as the agent.

On Friday, March 3, the title company called to say the lender had ordered the title work to begin. I was becoming optimistic. Ten minutes later a lady from the surveying company called to say they would be by to do the survey on Monday. Man, this might actually happen. However, in the back of my mind Brenda’s warnings continued to percolate: There are going to be problems and they will arise in the final 24 hours before the closing.

On Thursday, March 8, the title company called to ask if I was available to close that day. Does Jessie Jackson hate using the white courtesy phone at the airport? Heck yes, I’m available. The mortgage broker had called to say everything was approved and the loan package would be delivered to the title company within the hour. This was at 9:30 a.m. Ten-thirty came and went. Noon came and went. Finally around 1:00 the loan package arrives. Brenda calls to make the appointment with me and while she has me on the phone, her assistant interrupts her and says there’s a problem with the numbers. The lender is under the impression that the buyer has already purchased his home owner’s insurance, but he hadn’t. In other locales this might seem like a small thing; but here in Hurricane Alley where the annual insurance on a house like mine can run as much as $8,000, it completely throws off the amount of money the buyer is required to have in his bank as reserve on the day of the closing.

The title company worked everything up and sent the HUD to the lender. The lender called and said the buyer would need to come up with more money somewhere, somehow. My day was circling the drain. At 3:00 Brenda called to say there was no way there would be a closing that day. I got done at work at 4:00 and I headed to my standing Thursday happy hour in West Palm Beach. At 4:30 as I am walking through the door of City Cellar, my cell rings. It’s Brenda and she says, “I have money for you! When can you come in, sign the papers and pick up your check?” My check – the most beautiful words in the English language. Well, next to “I finally got my period.” But that’s another story for another time. I told Brenda I was in West Palm and could I come in first thing in the morning? No problem. She then says, you won’t believe what happened. I’ll tell you tomorrow.

I scoot out of work about 8:50 AM on Friday and make the 15-minute drive to Brenda’s office. We sit in the conference room and as I am signing things, she fills in the blanks of what happened the day before. The loan went back to the underwriters three times before it was all worked out. She still didn’t have the go ahead when the mortgage broker and the buyer showed up at her office about 3:30. Originally they were supposed to be there at 3:00, but when the deal when south, Brenda called and told them to hold off until the approval arrived. Evidently in Uruguay “hold off” means come half an hour late. At this point Brenda is figuring they have put all this work into this deal that isn’t going to fly and she isn’t going to get paid, but she starts going over the paperwork with the buyer (through the mortgage broker, of course) even though the approval hasn’t arrived. Fifteen minutes after the buyer arrives, so does the approval and the re-issued package. While they are sitting there signing the papers, the mortgage broker, who gets immediate e-mail alerts whenever a lender changes its program or goes out of business or whatever, receives an e-mail alert saying that as of midnight that day the lender involved in this deal will no longer offer full-financing deals. She said had this carried over into Friday, it would have been dead and the buyer would have had to start all over again securing financing from another source. That’s why she refers to it as the Santa Claus Close.

In any event, I am a free man. Now come the hassles of finding a place to live and moving. I guess no plan is perfect, but the tapping you hear is me doing the “happy boy” dance in my…er their driveway.

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