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.

Ennui and the Struggle to Get Things Done

Feelin' kinda strange lately. It's a combination of different factors that have been in play for a long time now I guess. I have this terrible habit of beginning projects and not finishing them. Frankly, I'm a little tired of it. This year I've been really trying to wrap all these projects up in a hurry. Since I've got some free time now (thankfully!), I've been doing some work on them.

Stay tuned for a new and innovative way of finding respectable chinese food restaurants, a superbly useful way of designing and sharing programs that recognize patterns in input (regular expressions, parser grammars, etc.) as well as a way of exploring different flavours of programming, and a multitude of ways to show the world your more Villainous™ side. In addition, I've resolved to begin writing again, which includes this and other blogs, as well as the possibility of a screenplay with one of my coworkers. I hereby declare this the Summer of Max.

The house hunt continues unabated. Well, maybe a little abated. I've been lazy about it because it's just so difficult. It seems so adult! I turn 25 this summer and by that time I will own my own home, be it a condo or a loft or some kind of bizarre industrial space. That last one has proven to be incredibly elusive but hopefully I can track one down. Another option is to just settle for a nice condo somewhere and then constantly be on the lookout for the perfect space. I really just need a place with a lot of room to spread out and compartmentalize my space the way that feels most natural to me. I keep going over in my head all these things about my current apartment that I don't like and how I could fix them in the next. It's a good exercise but it's setting me up for disappointment pretty much everywhere. The cheap places are all separated into rooms in a way that makes little sense to me and I know would end up annoying me. I don't want a place that's cute with little nick-nacks on neat shelves. I want a place with exposed brick and ductwork that I can hang stuff off if I want to. I want high ceilings and big windows. I don't know how easily that's going to happen but here's hoping.

And hey. Maybe I'll have an apartment situation I won't feel ashamed having people over to. We'll just see, space cadets. Later on.