Yesterday I got a call from a member of our lender's "Customer Dissatisfaction Team." Hey, here's a tip: If your lender has a whole team devoted to correcting mistakes and smoothing over angry customers, and that company would rather pay that team rather than just have capable employees avoiding dissatisfied customers, that might be a good sign to avoid that company entirely.

And it's still not over. At the beginning of this house buying nightmare, I was assigned an agent from the lender to work with. I worked with her until last week, when I started working with her boss, because she was so entirely incompetent. And by that, I mean twenty days AFTER she was supposed to have all her work done, she gave up and gave the work to her boss. I had actually spoken to her boss before and he didn't seem any better at his job than she was at hers. But since he was higher up the ladder, I thought he could help. I was wrong. Three days after their final deadline (which they did not make because...well, I don't know why they won't do their jobs. They procrastinate? They really hate paperwork? I have no idea what is taking them so long) He left a message on my voice mail:

"Would you contact the title company? I haven't got anything back from them for the for the final settlement statement, I've tried contacting them several times this morning and they just aren't responding. They really are slowing this whole process down. If you could call them and get on that, that would help things speed along."

Yeah. Besides his blatent attempt to pass the blame to someone else, the problem was a time difference: The title company wasn't open yet. It was too early in the morning. And why couldn't he have "tried contacting them several times" the day before?

After that I started working with his boss, who is a bit more helpful.

This morning I called the title company to ask if we had a closing date yet. She responded that they needed one more thing approved by the lender, and the lender wasn't responding. At this point, I lost it. Instead of calling the lender, I called my real estate agent. In between flashes of rage, hopelessness and desperation, I left him a message about how I refused to ever talk to anyone from the lender again, and how it was like having a ten year old child who won't do their homework. I informed him I would no longer call them to coax them into doing their own job, that I was done trying, and if that meant we didn't get the house than I didn't want the house. Period.

An hour later I call back from my real estate agent, who apparenly had taken pity on me and called the lender to go on a yelling spree with good results: We are funded (a big step in the right direction) we finally have a last possible day to close (for real this time) and there is even a chance we will have the keys to our new house tomorrow. Yes, that's right: tomorrow. Cross your fingers.