mortgage problems

Late in March TD Bank completed the takeover of Citizens' Bank's mortgage department where I've held my mortgage for the past 8 years. I was reassured by both parties that the transition would be smooth and there was no need to phone. Then on April 16 I got a call from TD saying my mortgage was 2 payments in arrears because they had not received the payment information from Citizens'Bank. They asked me to bring a voided cheque to my local TD branch so they would have my payment information.

I brought the voided cheque to my local branch the next day, only to be told they could not accept it because it was voided. I silently smoldered as I asked the cute but clueless teller to take the account and transit numbers down anyway, since they would need this for future payments. He did tell me the mortgage number that TD had assigned to my account, since I hadn't received anything in writing from them since the takeover. He offered to take a payment out of my line of credit (which was fully paid off) but said he would need me to pay 4 payments. But I am only 2 payments in arrears, I protested to no avail. I asked to speak to a mortgage specialist but he said they were all busy and I'd need to come back next week. So I stomped out of the bank and returned home without making a payment, but at least now I had my mortgage account number.

I called TD's 800# with my new mortgage account number and related my problems. They agreed that I only owed 2 payments but said that they couldn't help me because my account had already been sent to their collections department as it was in arrears. There was nothing they could do until Collections was ready to contact me with threatening letters. I explained I received the news that it was in arrears only the night before and I had responded as fast as I could. I had plenty of money in a chequing account waiting to make the payments and a clear line of credit with the same bank and branch. Why couldn't they accept payment?!!

I was fuming by this point. It was not my fault the transition had not gone as smoothly as promised. They apologized and said it was highly irregular to accept a mortgage payment out of a line of credit but that in this case, since I was not to blame, they would "make an exception". That was a Saturday and the payment could not be processed until Monday but they took the numbers from my chequing account for future payments, numbers that would be verified by the local bank which had copied them from my voided cheque. I was assured over and over again that there would be nothing more I needed to do, that everything had been resolved. Furthermore, at my insistence, they would remove the interest charges on my line of credit that I would normally have to pay to cover the "loan".

That was 2 weeks ago. I phoned yesterday to make sure the latest bi-weekly payment had gone through smoothly last Wednesday. It hadn't. The first 2 payments in arrears had been paid from my line of credit on the 19th but the account numbers I had provided to both the local branch and the phone agents had not been recorded anywhere. I was put through to Collections who advised me to go down to the local branch again today and give them specific instructions to FAX though a copy of a voided cheque to their office so they could take out the latest payment that was in arrears.

I went to the local branch after breakfast this morning and spoke to another teller, not as cute but equally clueless. He said he had to get permission from his mortgage department to FAX the cheque to Collections. I asked him to check to see if I would be sent a monthly statement about my balance. He got permission but the mortgage department but said they only send out statements annually. The first statement I'd receive would be on the anniversary of their botched take-over.

I was back home a short while later when I got a call from the teller saying the FAX would not go through. He had tried it four times. He said either they were closed or that the number they gave me was incorrect. I asked if he could find out which of these it was by checking the number and whether they were open on Saturdays. He said he didn't know how. I asked if he could at least try putting it through again on Monday, but he said I would need to come down again with another voided cheque on Monday. That would mean taking half a day off work to get that done, with no assurances that it would happen anyway.

So I called the 800# again, which I have now memorized, and spoke to another agent. She kept me on hold the better part of 45 minutes while she checked the rules, which she claimed, contradicting the last phone agent, that she could take over the phone. But first she had to take yet another payment out of my line of credit. She promised that she would do a little calculation and remove the interest charges of the 3 payments. She claims to have made "extensive" notes to instruct others what needs to be done. A loud voice was screaming in my head' "But they won't do it!"

"Don't you worry, Sir," she tried to reassure me. "I have fixed the problem for good. I'm your buddy now! We're as good as married." Then she went on to give me a speech about the importance of good customer service and dedication to one's job. blah blah blah.... Your little buddy is wielding a baseball bat at the moment, I was thinking under my breath while I endured her self-basting assessment of the quality of her work. She assured me there was no need to call again.

Right! And as soon as my $2600 tax refund comes through I will pay off the penalty for leaving my mortgage contract early and head to another bank!

a senior's moment

(Update: I'm on my 3rd day home with a head cold. The sore throat is gone and although I feel stronger today I am glad I stayed home. At this moment I am at the peak of the runny nose/sneezing phase. It is miserable. I have post-nasal "waterfall" and I blow my brains out every few minutes in a sneezing fit. I've given up on tissues and am resorting to paper towels because they are larger. My nose is raw. Somebody shoot me now!)

Yesterday, when I got up to the cashier at Shoppers' Drug Mart she smiled at me with a glint of recognition in her eye. "Are you..." I was flattered that she might recognize me. She hesitated and began again with a slight blush in her cheeks. "Are you.... ("that famous stained glass artist who did that window..." I expected her to say) ...55?"

"What?" I said, caught totally off-guard.

"I'm sorry. I hate asking people that, but today is Seniors' Day in the store and you could get 10% off for your purchases...."

There's a first for everything. I've never been asked that before. There goes my self-image of one who looks years younger than his age. Nothing quite like having someone piss in your soup. I took the crappy 10% discount out of spite and glumly left the store.


"There's nothing as inconvenient as an old queen with a head cold." - Robert Preston in "Victor Victoria"

Quality of life

This is my second day at home with a cold. It has been a drag, except for the extra hour of sleep each morning. Yesterday my throat felt like I had swallowed boiling oil, or a bunch of needles and they got stuck there. I drank enough hot tea to sink a ship but it made no difference. There was no improvement by bedtime.

Somehow I managed to sleep quite solidly in spite of my discomfort. My waking dream was about food. I was pigging out on a cartload of sweets that others were tempting me to try. I was feeling a bit guilty and making excuses for the indulgence, knowing that as a diabetic I shouldn’t be eating any of it. My friend Leanne says I’m becoming more like a woman as I age. I think she’s right, not that that is a bad thing. Not only am I more interested in security than passion, but now chocolate is looking better than sex.

I woke up at 8, an hour later than usual, having slept the whole night through without interruption. My throat felt worse than when I went to bed so I called in sick again. There’s no way I could spend the whole day on the phone non-stop, explaining policy and legislation to the terminally bewildered. Since getting up, the pain in my throat has subsided to a mild discomfort, though I have been sneezing occasionally. Besides these symptoms, I feel quite well except for a gentle tiredness.

But being at home is no fun. There really doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go except when I want to eat, drink or shop. I had breakfast at Joe’s Diner late morning, which I ate luxuriously slowly. It’s a cool, bright morning, perfect for my mid-week weekend, but with a cool breeze. After breakfast I sauntered up to Shoppers’ Drug Mart and West Valley Produce to do some shopping. My legs are a bit weaker than usual, which I blame on the virus.

Now I am home again with no real reason to go out. My place is so much darker than the sunshine outside, but I don’t think it’s wise to sit in the cool wind. Yesterday I tried writing on my novel but my words came out dry, dry, dry. I just couldn’t get into it. My 100-day writing drive have faltered for the past two weeks.

Being alone without much to do gets me wondering what life will be like in a few years when I retire, when my theme song becomes “Too Much Time On My Hands”. I was always active and engaged in my 30s and 40s and more athletic than most of my friends. I never foresaw myself coming to this dilemma so soon. I have lost the ability to do many of the things I have enjoyed in the past, and have often pondered my fate without coming to any clearer understanding of what lies in store for me.

I have also been thinking about a university study that was done on aging and quality of life. The study claimed to measure quality of life, though probably it only measured physical abilities of the seniors involved. Only the arrogance of youth can claim that quality of life means being able to do what they can do. Many able-bodied youths have terrible lives. Who is to say that needing others to do your grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning for you isn’t an improvement in your quality of life? I am sure quality of life has much more to do with one’s ability to adapt to changing realities—physical, emotional, economic—and to find joy in the activities within one’s reach. It’s about the drive to experience life and to dance with it, even if the only thing one can do is listen, and not to resign oneself to futility and helplessness. That is the challenge.

Work on top of work

I have a new Team Leader at work. She's all full of enthusiasm and integrity, as new management can be. She's very good really, generous with her compliments and pep talks. I worked with her on the same team as an equal for several years but she is more capable of putting up with the bull shit from upper management in Ottawa than I am, so I have kept my head low and she moved up the ladder.

Friendly co-workers can be the best supervisors or the worst of enemies as they move up and I have worried about her promotion over me from the start. She can be a stickler for detail likes to make herself busy. Since upper management doesn't give Team Leaders much "meaningful" work to do, zealous TLs will sometimes get into micro-managing. For example, she has listened into more of my phone calls in the past month or so than I have had monitored over the past five years. So far, she has had primarily strong compliments for what she has heard, but it is still a bit unnerving to be so constantly under surveillance.

Every few months, upper management reluctantly allows each team to have an hour off the phones for a team meeting to share news, discuss problems and make plans for special events. Management is saving money by not rehiring so we are short staffed, so training upgrades are seldom given. Occasionally one of the program advisers pays a visit to explain something new, which uses up half of our team meeting. (Sorry, no time for questions. Sorry, only time for announcements and no time for round table discussions.)

But usually there isn't much to fill the hour, if we get that long and there is no training, so my Team Leader has asked some of us to prepare certain reviews of legislation and policy to bring the team up to snuff of what changes have happened. Knowing me well, she has asked me give a presentation on requirements for getting Old Age Security. I've been advising clients about this for over a decade so I believed I knew it all, but incredibly she has pointed out to me several small exceptions I didn't know about and I was stunned by my ignorance. Furthermore, she has listened to everyone on our team and has found that no one else has the complete picture either. I suppose it doesn't help that our training manuals were never correct.....

I have been avoiding the preparation of my presentation, assuming it would be easy, but I am finally getting into it. I want to do a thorough job and I find the new challenge refreshing. Earlier this week she asked me to give it today but was unable to get me more than 30 minutes of prep time, which clearly not enough. I'll chip away at it over the coming month and hopefully we'll have another meeting sometime in May or June.

Bad dream

Last night I was in the middle of a pleasant but somewhat frustrating dream, you know, where something was transpiring that seemed like it was going to turn into hot sex but I couldn't quite get it to go there. I was with this really hot guy who obviously liked me but he had to do something first. He had to make this model or something for a presentation and he wanted me to help. He managed to convince me it was important and I thought if we could get it done we'd eventually have sex. It never works that way, of course. Once dreams drift away from eroticism they never go back there, but I'm not one to give up hope.

So we're trying to build this model with limited materials. It included some kind of motor. We thought we had constructed it properly but when we turned it on it started making a scratching noise, like a rat trying to get out of a box. We became concerned and turned it off.

I woke up then and as I slowly rose up towards consciousness I realized the dream has stopped but the scratching had not. There was someone at my door trying to insert a key into my lock.

Now I live in a building with two corridors and a common elevator waiting area that joins them in the middle, with elevators on both sides. On occasion, residents get geometrically confused when they leave the elevator and head the wrong way. I quickly surmised it was the woman who had moved recently into the condo in the opposite corner of the floor, but I wasn't about to get out of bed and greet her in the buff at the door. Besides, I was still half-asleep and still hoping to relocate my dream and my hot date, so I let her keep scratching.

I found it all amusing until she opened the door. I often don't bother to lock my door as the building is very safe. I've left my door unlocked when I am at home every night since I moved here 8 years ago and nothing has ever happened. So she figured out the door wasn't locked and she walked in and turned on the light. "OH!" she gasps when she realized that maybe, while she was out drinking, someone hadn't changed the number and lock on her door, hadn't built a new laundry room opposite her suite and hadn't painted and redecorated her apartment -- that she was actually in the wrong apartment.

She quickly turns off the light and leaves, of course. I chuckle, roll over and go back to sleep. If I found the man of my dreams again I'll never know, but in the morning I found my front door hanging open. The stupid bitch didn't even bother to close it when she left. Obviously she was drunk. If only I was sure it was the woman from the opposite corner of the floor I would leave a nasty note on her door, but it is best to let it go. I guess I'd better start locking my door from now on.

Cafe a Go-Gone

Café a Go-Go was a half a block from my door. Every Sunday I sauntered down the hill to meet other Radical Faeries there, at Faerie Coffee, between 11 and 1. Usually not many showed up. On a typical day there were four or five of us: myself, Aunty Tinkerbell, Pure Heart, Raspberry Showboat, Rainbow Strongheart and, on alternating or occasional Sundays, Danzante Caldera, Gerry, Stitch, Holly and perhaps an out of town guest.

Sometimes, during bad weather, when there was an event that blocked the streets downtown (a marathon race or Santa Claus Parade) or when there was another distraction (Ravenna Ravine in Seattle, which is held on Beltane, or the Easter gathering at Crow Dog and Robin Hood's on Salt Spring Island, to which I was not invited) I would be the only Fae who showed up at the café. Being only half a block away it was too convenient and too much of a worry for others if I didn't show up.

On those days especially, I had excellent opportunity to chat with Raj, the owner. Raj is from Sri Lanka, a 30-something with a wife and a newborn daughter. Handsome is a way, except for his buck teeth. When Faeriebud originally recreated Faerie Coffee at the café, it was owned by Scot, a gay, middle-aged loner who welcomed us but rarely interacted with us. We all worried where we'd have to relocate when he decided to sell, but Raj was eager to keep us coming and totally comfortable with our nonconformity. When we were alone I talked with him about every subject we could think of: politics, the economy, interior decorating for the café, gay life, men I have dated, his little daughter, living in Vancouver and Canada, etc.

But the Olympics were a bad turn for him. They frightened away most of his clientele and they didn't come back to their original numbers after the Games. His business also suffered with new cafes and chain stores opening around him and then I suppose the final straw was learning that his City taxes would double in August, another side effect of the Olympics. Two weeks ago he announced to us that he had sold the business and five days ago he was gone for good.

In the meantime, I decided for the group that we would meet at the Bread Garden, 100m up the street. Having made the announcement I felt obliged to set off last Sunday morning to hold fort. I was a tad late and met Rainbow leaving the place, having just given up on the rest of us. He followed me back in and nested in the back corner where there were two black vinyl love seats set away from the rigid array of cheap chrome and black vinyl stacking chairs and matching tables. A few minutes later Holly joined us.

The Bread Garden has the sterile atmosphere of a new chain store, designed, I suppose, to be safe for straight couples and nuclear families. There were a few of those passing through but none of them seemed perturbed by Holly's flowing, flowed dress, velour purple vest and fez (his gay Sufi look). Still, it felt strange and a bit uncomfortable, the cookie cutter baristas and the food boring and overly sweet. I think it would be better to hold Faerie Coffee in an independent coffee house with more character and less conformity.

Café a Go-Go is now owned by a Japanese/Korean couple. They plan to convert it to a milk bar --"Holy Calcium, Batman!" We'll need to check that out when it opens in two weeks.

100 day mission - starting over

False start. My initial starting date near the second half of March was a no go. So many things got in the way, not the least of which was my continuing confusion over what to do with the story.

The false start did get me thinking, however, and now I have a much clearer idea how to proceed for now. I decided to restart my push to finish Chapter 27 this weekend. Friday I was quite sick with a head cold: achiness, sneezing, cotton brain and the works. But yesterday I actually made progress.

Today, Day 2, I got home from Faerie Coffee early (I was the only one who showed up) and got right into it. I was really motoring, better than I had done in many months, when my out-of-town friend Mike, who has been staying me the past week, came in. That killed it. Of course he wanted to talk about what he had done over the past day since we last talked (he had stayed over at another friend's place last night), make phone calls and organize his stuff.

I offered to let him stay with me and as a host it just isn't right to deny him full access to my place when he needs it, but there is no way I can write when being spoken to or distracted by surrounding noise. He announced he would hang out at my place three hours until another friend picked him up for dinner. I chatted briefly, as briefly as I could get away with, and then headed to my room and shut the door as soon as he picked up the phone to make some calls.

I waited there, frustrated, thwarted and trapped for 45 minutes until he got bored and arranged to pass time with another friend for a couple hours. As soon as he left I went right back at it and spun out a few more paragraphs.

Hon stood me up again yesterday, having promised the night before to be off by mid-afternoon and that he'd call me to make arrangements to see me soon afterwards. This was his last chance. I read him the Riot Act last weekend and made it clear I neither like him standing me up or showing up hours late without at least a phone call. I am not answering any phone calls (not having call display) so that I won't need to listen to his pleading or hollow apologies. I won't let him get away with this.

But I am not upset. I have clarification, nothing more. I feel back to full strength after my cold has subsided, and i am revved to keep writing. There is nothing else at this time I want to focus on. Mike will fly home Wednesday morning and the coast will be clear. I will continue to do as much as I can while he is here.