Settlement Day (Friday, May 30th)

It's raining here in Switzerland, I'm waiting for Marion to wake up, and Brian has left for a meeting a work. So here I am, trying to catch up.

Settlement day was, um, interesting. A day where we tried to plan so that everything went smoothly, and then it didn't. I would say that everything that could go wrong did go wrong, but we still sold our house. So that wouldn't be true.

Anyway, it started with a 9 am settlement for the house. Except that when Brian and I were on our way to the settlement, we got a call from a realtor who was at the 8 am walkthru at our home.

Apparently the young man who bought our house was upset that we took the full length green dining room curtains. I thought this was odd, considering we excluded them from the contract because they were given to us by my mother when we bought the house. But we decided to see if he would bring it up at settlement.

The second piece of news she had for us was that the guy hadn't gone to the bank the night before but was going that morning. After the walkthru.

So he was going to be late to the settlement. On a day where we had already pushed it back from 8 am to 9 am and Brian and I were tight on time because we had a million errands to run. Wonderful.

We decided to go to settlement anyway to get the seller's paperwork done and try to speed it along. Which helped a bit, but we still ended up waiting for him.

Once he arrived, a bit past 9:30, he had a ton of questions. Which I can understand since he was a first time home buyer. But I found it especially annoying being a seller who was leaving the country in 2 days.

Good news out of the settlement: he never brought up the curtains and we settled. Bad news: we were running late when we left.

Now here's some background for the next bump on our Friday adventure. My realtor and I did some research on the best way to get cash the day of settlement to bring with us over here. She called the title company and I called Wachovia. Wachovia told me a cashiers check was best (even if it was from a different bank) so we decided to get a portion of the settlement that way and the rest would be wired.

So Brian and my next stop was to Wachovia. We arrived, waited in line, and then went to the teller giving her our cashiers check and information.

Oops, can't cash this. It's from a different bank who says they haven't issued it yet (because it wasn't in their system yet). And it isn't scanning properly.

Awesome.

So we told the teller, "We were told this would be fine by this bank last week. We need this cash today."

Response: "Nothing I can do. Try going to the other bank and cashing it."

So we left, visibly frustrated and cursing the bank under our breaths.

We then went to the mall to meet up with Brian's parents who had Marion. We had to give them the key to my sister's car, since Brian had mistakenly brought it with us and she needed it. While at the mall, I got an iPod. I'm slowly inching my way into technology. (I'm the girl who has a cellphone that is 5 years old. Well, had.)

We left the mall and went to the other bank to try and resolve the check issue. They were very nice at the other bank, a world of difference than our experience at Wachovia that morning. Unfortunately though, they couldn't help us. It was already close to afternoon and they didn't have the funds to cash the check. So back we went to Wachovia.

We walked into the Wachovia ready for battle. Asked to see a manager but was told he was out to lunch. So a financial manager (the guys that sit in the booths in suits) met with us. We told him the whole story. And he explained that his teller was doing the right thing by denying cashing of the check but that he would release half of the check to us. We explained that the only reason we were in this predicament was because someone at this branch had given us bad information last week, we had a long relationship with Wachovia, and that we needed the funds now. He agreed to shorten the hold time on the money and take the entire check.

So we ended up getting a satisfactory ending to the money saga. However it took 4 times as long as we should have, was incredibly frustrating, and it pushed all of our other errands from the morning to the afternoon.

Next stop was lunch. Arguing with Wachovia makes you hungry.

Then we went to the jewelers. I had to pick up a ring and get a new battery for my watch. Ring was done (had an engraving polished out of the inside of it), then I waited for my watch. I was promised it would be done in less than 15 minutes.

After about 15 minutes of waiting, I noticed that while they had polished out the engraving, they had also polished out the stamp saying what kind of gold it was. So I went back to the counter to get it stamped. The lady took it back and I waited. When she brought it back it was stamped, but it looked like the stamped had knicked the side of the ring. So she took it back again and I waited again. She finally brought it back, fixed.

I looked up at the clock and realized it had been 25 minutes since I gave them my watch. I went over to the watch counter and waiting in another line to see if it was done, despite my number not being on the done list. And it ended up being done. The guy working the counter had forgotten to put my number on the notification board.

So we left with one more errand completed. Next stop: picking up my car from detailing.

We arrived early and it wasn't done yet. But at this point Brian and I had eaten and had come to expect the waiting so it wasn't nearly as frustrating. Plus it was only going to be 10 more minutes.

After the car was done we took it up to my aunt's house, stopping to fill up the gas tank on the way. The car looked fantastic, they did a great job detailing it. It looked new again! Definitely something I should have done while I had the car so I got to enjoy it.

We went back to my parent's house after dropping off the car to get everything we needed for the afternoon errands. At this point we were so behind we decided to split the errands instead of Brian staying home and getting started on the work we had to get done there. So Brian took the tags to the DMV and I returned to cable box to Comcast.

Comcast. They let you cancel your account fairly quickly, but only because you then have to return your box and remote to the Comcast service center. What a racket.

There were four windows open, but only three windows were accepting equipment. The last one was accepting payments only. Typical. Funny part was that no one in line was there to give a payment, we all were carrying boxes. You'd think that the woman would then change over to help out the line, right? Wrong. She sat back and opened her magazine. That Comcast doesn't want to make you wait to pay up!

When I got there the line wasn't too bad, only 5 people ahead of me. When I got up to the front of the line though, there were 15 people behind me. I definitely go thtere at the right time. Thankfully someone appeared from the back room to elp with the line before I got up to the front though. However, it turned out that this wasn't as big of a help as you would think. A woman at one of the customer service windows was taking forever to do whatever she needed to do. I have no idea what the issue was but at one point TWO of the service reps had to figure it out, meaning that there were only 3 windows available again.

It sounds frustrating, right? But at this point I found our whole day amusing and was amazed at watching the way Comcast worked.

I finally made it to a counter (two reps still helping that woman). It took 2 minutes to drop off the box and remote and get the confirmation slip and I was out of there.

Brian's time at the DMV went a lot smoother than my trip to Comcast did. He even had time to renew his license! Shocking for the DMV on a Friday afternoon.

The rest of the day consisted of packing and cleaning our stuff from every nook and cranny of my parent's house.

I did get to go out for girl time that Friday night. It was a great break with drinks and then to see the Sex and the City movie. Drinks were fun, movie was alright. It was entertaining, but everyone got a happy ending and most of it seemed forced. So unlike SATC. But I had a great time relaxing and went right to sleep when I got home at 2 am. Had to because Saturday was going to be just as busy as Friday.

Interesting fact: this post was saved at 9:01. (Entwurf wurde gespeichert um 09:01) Blogspot is going to help me learn german. Who knew?!