If You Really Loved Me You'd Let Me Eat Your Brain

What a messed up day. Mrs. The Reverend and I made an offer on a place on Monday and got a counter-offer today. Our attorney met with Anne this morning to review it but I couldn't make it – I had too many meetings at work so they teleconferenced me in.  (I was at Casa de Lara trying to transact some bidness at the time.  Damn!)  The attorney advised us to change one line of the counter-offer. All we had to do was sign the counter-offer and counter-counter-offer and deliver everything to the seller's agent.  At least I think that's what he said.

But not so fast! Anne had to work at 3 PM today so I didn't get a chance to talk to her and look over the paperwork in person. The plan was for me to take the paperwork and meet with our real estate agent after work to do the paperwork.

First off, Anne didn't sign and initial the paperwork as she was supposed to, but I don't blame her. She never got to meet with, or even talk to, our real estate agent, whom I'll call Jared. He had jury duty today but he was pretty sure he'd be done by 5 PM.  Not that it mattered since Anne was at work by then, but maybe life has been rough for the poor guy and he's hitting the pipe as way to relax.  Sometimes crack messes with your short-term memory.  Anyway,  the case must have gone to the jury sometime this afternoon because he was still in deliberations as of 10:30 PM.  Suck-o.  He managed to slip a note (or a text message) to another agent in his office who would help me, in theory, to finish the paperwork.

Around 7:30 PM I got a call from a woman with a heavy accent. She asks for Anne and butchers our last name, so I assume she's a telemarketer and prepare to give her a glimpse of the soul-devouring hatred I have for said persons. As it turns out she's the real estate agent who is supposed to help me with the paperwork. It takes a while for us to establish that though. At first I though she was talking about Jerry's Kids or asking for money from some damn charity. I guess Russians have a hard time with words like "Jared."

So I make my way to the real estate office and I'm met by the women whose name I can't spell. English is her third or fourth language. She paused a few times when reading the counteroffer, puzzled by terms such as "shall", "not less than", "at" and the pesky "be." Minor little things! We eventually got a counter-counter-offer written. Now all I had to do was get Anne to sign off on it.

I drove to her place of work, tracked her down, and got her to sign everything. That was another hassle because she works in the infant ICU. She can't be out of earshot of her patients in case they explode or need her attention, and I'm not supposed to enter the area she's in. After much deliberation with another nurse as a go-between we all decide I can stand in a hallway where I can't see the patients (and medical records, I'm assuming) and she'll sign everything while still kind of standing in the room she's assigned to. Freakin' comical.

Then I go home. My next task is to fax everything in. I give the counter-offer written by the seller's agent a thorough going over. I discover all sorts of errors, eight at last count. They're not all major but, like, my name is wrong on the counter-offer. The address where Anne and I live is wrong. The non-word "Iff" appears. One line has an additional comma that confuses the meaning of the sentence containing it. And another contingency says the buyers are to "deliver a prequel letter within three days form acceptance." Form? Prequal?! What the hell is a prequal? If she meant prequalification she should have spelled it out. Damn, woman!

GAaaaaGH!! My valve is closing!!!

In the end I decided I wouldn't respond to the counter-offer. There were just too many errors for me to correct. I'll write an e-mail to the seller's agent, and maybe the sellers themselves, explaining the problems I found. All in all I think it best to start over fresh with a new offer, one free of errors, and one where my name isn't "Thomas O. Mueller."