Month end blues

It's the same every month end, and worse yet, it's the same every YEAR end. You know it's coming, but it doesn't take the bitterness out of it. Lenders are slow on loan documents, sellers are out of town, trust deeds from 1992 haven't been reconveyed. Cash transactions are opened on a Monday and expected to close on a Wednesday. We have the day after Thanksgiving off but live with the constant threat of having to to work it anyway.

Here's what I would like to have done during my lunch this three-day week: tan, go to Target, tan, have some food. If yesterday is any indication, it's not happening. I'm destined to go to Mexico as white as the day I was born. You'd think I'd be able to sneak out for one lousy hour (half hour even?) but no. The panicked emails and phone calls don't stop, and it is transferred to us poor (ha, like I have no control) escrow people who are so easily manipulated into thinking that just because the agent thinks it SHOULD happen, it will. Or else.

Or else what? Close on the cash transaction TODAY, when the buyer isn't even going to be in the STATE until next Tuesday? Whose agenda is THAT? Certainly not the buyer's, why would he want a house he won't even get keys to until next week? The thing about my job is that everything we do is reliant upon somebody else, most of whom do not have near the sense of urgency we have. Nobody ever told us up front when we got into this business that the biggest part of our job was convincing other people to care as much as we do if something gets done. We all know the service industry these days - people just don't care (don't believe me? Call the phone company some afternoon. People just don't care.).

It's a short week but, as is the tradition, we have to pack five days into three, all the while dealing with the codependency that makes us good escrow people what we are. And having to deal with the fact that it's November 24 and K103 is already playing Christmas music 24/7.

Bah.