Once upon a time, my brothers and I all lived together in a house. I'm not referring, in this case, to the house I grew up in, but the house nearby in the big city, which my parents purchased for us to live in while we went to university and learned stuff. It was very nice of them. Very, very nice. Alas, two of the three brothers--myself included--moved out rather quickly, but the house and its remaining sibling occupant lived on. And, as is more relevant to the current discussion, so did the mortgage for said house. Now, given that my brothers and I were all to live in this house, it was deemed that the mortgage would be in all three of our names, as well as my parents. We thought we should change this recently, to reflect, well, reality, and get my brother and my names off that mortgage.
This is a process much, much easier said than done.
Now, the basic way to do such a financial transaction is to come down to the bank and sign some papers. That works great, in theory, but if you're a few thousand kilometers and multiple provinces away from said bank, that isn't going to work. The original plan, then, as okayed by the bank, was that my parents would obtain my permission by phone, and attest to the fact that it was me speaking. This was at the end of June. A few weeks later, the bank decided that this was not, in fact, good enough. While they trusted my parents enough to give them thousands of dollars, they were clearly not trustworthy enough to verify that they had their childrens' go-ahead. So instead, I was to receive a scanned version of the contract, and sign it myself, then either scan it back or fax it back. But again, the bank couldn't actually trust that something as ephemeral as a digital copy was real, so I had to mail a physical copy of the signed scan back to Saskatchewan.
Now at this point, I really haven't done much besides roll my eyes as the bank bureaucracy from afar. But now that I was entrusted with the signing of the scanned contract, I had a job to do. And I kind of dropped the ball. It took me weeks to get all this stuff together. In my defense, it was more stuff than it may appear. First, I had to print off the document. Then I had to sign it. Then I had to rescan it. Then put it an envelope, affix a stamp, and send it back west. The problem was that my home computer could scan, but not print. The campus library computers could print but not scan. And neither location had a ready supply of either stamps or envelops. (Or, as I found out, pens for writing addresses). So what followed were several days in which I'd remember to buy an envelop, but forget the stamp. Or I'd be at home, and remember I needed to print something off. Or I'd make the scan, then remember I'd forgotten to sign the paper.
My favorite intermission was when I emailed my father a copy of my rescanned, signed version, and told him that I'd mail the copy when he confirmed that it looked okay. Only it took him a week to do that (he was away on vacation, which is fair enough), and by then, I had, of course, misplaced the paper copy. So I spent about an hour ransacking my room for that, then decided it wasn't going to be found. But that meant I had to make a new copy altogether, since the other was dated (I suppose I could have reprinted the scan of the scan, but I was worried the bank folk were looking for a pen-signature, and wouldn't accept something that was clearly printed off). So I went to campus, printed off another copy, signed it then and there, bought a stamp and envelope, went home, and prepared to scan it before mailing it west--then found the original scanned signed copy still lying where I left it, face-down on my scanner.
Honestly, it amazes me that people my age have children. I can barely keep track of a piece of paper for an hour at a time.
Later Days.
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