The Most Asinine Thing Ever

Got a phone call early this morning (9am) from Wamu saying they couldn't issue my loan, even after all the paperwork had been shuffled around and I'd spent a month assuming that whole mortgage thing was well in hand. Their reason: not enough units in the condo building had sold yet. WHAT? Seriously? I mean... really? The phone call woke me up, so I had a hard time processing it, that somewhere on the other end of that telephone call there was someone saying this with a straight face. After a couple of questions to confirm that the lady at Wamu wasn't just yanking my chain and making shit up, it appeared that it really was like that.

I sprang into action, making some phone calls and emailing people. Got in touch with another mortgage broker with whom I'd worked before getting bamboozled by Wamu. He seemed optimistic until he found out that I lost my job a couple of weeks ago. I am absolutely confident that I'll be able to pay my bills just fine but it's hard to transfer that confidence to a lender in this market. I understand that. But still, I really do feel like none of this was my fault and I've just been royally screwed. I have put months of effort and a non-trivial amount of my time and money into this venture and now it is folding because of a bank's incompetence combined with Fave Media's decision to let me go, which I also contest.

I don't really know what to do right now. Go back to school? Get another full-time job that I'll inevitably hate after just a few short months? Try to work for myself (in a rented apartment... grrrrrr) and make it really work then buy an apartment two years from now—inevitably in a less favourable market? None of the options seem so great.

The Fave thing still really burns me a little. I just really feel like my perspective on what was going on was never really consulted and when offered it was never acknowledged. We all have our own opinions of what people can be expected to do for what amount of money, and for me I thought I was a programmer who would be doing a little bit of systems administration. As a sysadmin I think I did a really great job, and as a programmer when left to my own devices I think I performed similarly. The work environment at Fave, the requirement that I be in the office during business hours when the other programmer had no such requirement, the constant interruptions, and the increasingly unreasonable demands that I fix all the windows PCs in the office, were all very detrimental to my productivity.

I don't know if that perfect work environment for me really exists or if I'll be able to sufficiently convince the proprietors thereof that hiring me would be a good idea. I hope it does, because it's not my fault that I can't sleep at night and it's not my fault that four years of college for theoretical computer science didn't teach me how to set up printers in Windows XP. When I'm in a cooperative environment with coworkers that I like and respect, where I'm not interrupted often and where I'm not spread too thin, I absolutely excel. When I'm in an environment where I'm absolutely everybody's first-tier tech support guy, I don't, and I think that's perfectly understandable. 

This whole thing just leaves me feeling ill.