Your soul may be repossessed
So, we went to the bank to apply for a mortgage like some kind of responsible adults.
We went with Pete's bank, best known in the UK for having adverts where terrified employees are cajoled into forming a cheerful choir and ruining musical classics. Up until now, Pete was dealing with the financial side of things, for several reasons:
- He's good at it, being a prudent Yorkshireman
- It's a legitimate use for 'I'm sorry, my husband deals with the household finances'. Sorry, feminism.
- Using the above excuse because dealing with finance in general makes me want to gouge my own face off with a rusty spoon.
Despite this, we decided it should be a joint application because I'd quite like to help chip into bricks and mortar in whatever small way I can. So it was that we ended up in a very grim office with a cheerful woman named Catherine who hadn't actually expected I'd turn up. Good start.
The first unfortunate issue was that it seems nobody applies for mortgages in England to buy houses not in England. She was wholly unaware of the differences in the process in Scotland, and after I explained 'conclusion of missives' was basically exchanging contracts, she referred to it hereafter as 'whatever you called it', 'or whatever it is' and so on. There was also a lot of 'oh ignore that fee, I don't think you pay for surveyors but I'm not sure, lol Scotland'. *goes a tiny bit McGlashan*
The next thing that was clear is that if you're not in regular 9-5 full-time employment, you're going to get the third degree. My friend who's also househunting is getting a hard time with brokers because her PhD salary is paid termly and her teaching income is irregular. So don't be a freelancer or anything unconventional.
Pete put me down as 'homemaker'- no, sorry, 'Houseperson' as the politically-correct drop-down list said. Fair enough. During a lull in which Pete was calling the conveyancer, the world's most awkward moment happened:
Her: *smiles unsettlingly*
Me: *awkward smile*
Her: So, have you started looking for work?
Me: Erm, no. I might look when I'm up north.
Her: ._.
Me: ._.
Later, filling in some online forms:
Her: What sort of career are you aiming for in Scotland?
Now, at this point I considered saying a variety of things, from 'I'll find some freelance work to tide me over somehow', to 'I'll be finishing my book' to 'Put me down as Herder Of Watery Bastards And Delinquent Punks', to explaining I spent eight hours luring the latter out of my head with wall-to-wall Damned so I could finish some meta-story. But this is the Real World, you see.
Me: Well, I was a technical consultant, and then I was in publishing, so I don't know-
Her: I'LL JUST PUT YOU DOWN AS HOMEMAKER THEN.
Me: -_-
Oh yes, the online forms. Pete clocked the creaky Celeron-powered Lenovo on the floor fuelling the highly-advanced process. Yes, you're way ahead of me; it was running XP and IE6. This would be bad enough, if it wasn't for the fact that all of these things happened:
- A serious-looking error dialog popped up. She clicked through it. When we pointed it out, she just said 'Oh, that happens all the time. We just cancel it'. YOU JUST CANCEL IT.
- Every single page took a decade to load. She said it might be because $OtherBank who took them over simply tacked on their legacy systems and didn't bother updating them or anything. I can quite believe it. WELL THAT AND YOUR BROWSER SMELLS OF WEE.
- When printing stopped working, she took the reasoned approach of taking a screenshot with PrtScr, pasting it into a new Outlook email, then printing it from there, helpfully cutting off all the relevant costs column in the process. I realise this is one step away from The Wooden Table.
- Her email signature was in Comic Sans. This was when I urged sweet death to steal me away into more Calibri-fonted lands.
- And when it all got too awkward, she added 'But you work in computers, don't you? You're probably used to this!' *imagines husband slouched over a Windows XP machine, coding a storm up in FrontPage, sobbing quietly*
She then gave us the talk about critical illness/life insurance. Most of it was aimed at me. Because I have no job you see. A worrying amount of time was taken on how great it would be when Pete got hit by a bus and the mortgage would be instantly paid off and then I would be happy. Then again, there was a flipchart on the desk open at the page breaking down claims for critical illness and the high percentage of cancer rates by gender, so we're already into morbid territory. If I ever hear 'guesstimate', 'target life bracket' or 'ek-cetera' again, I'm going to murder everyone around me. STOP BUZZWORDING ME, BRO.
Then she vanished, returning with a man worryingly similar in appearance to Uncle Fester. He also wanted to talk to us about death. He told us about how we shouldn't rely on employer benefits because even though the bank had employed him 'for donkey's years' they could 'drop me tomorrow' and then what would little Mary-Sue do because she's only 6 and you have kids yes? He assured us their uncompetitive deal covered things like depression, a feeling that was starting to wash over me the more he threatened us with statistics. Did you know 20% of people claim in the first 5 years, presumably PTSD from sitting through all this wank.
During this litany Cath had returned with yet another person, and they both stood over my chair rustling papers and wearing the same fake smile I imagine the factory glues onto them when they're constructed. At this point I'm not sure if I'm about to be carted off as a ritual sacrifice or whether everyone's about to have a big mortgage dance party. Actually, it was just that Pete had to 'upgrade' his current account in order to have the mortgage.
This process could have taken 5 minutes, if she hadn't tried to persuade me to switch our joint account to them or list benefits we'll never use with the fee-paying account we'll never take. Depressingly, the walls were so thin I could hear a Polish lady pleading with the adviser next door that her Tesco salary was enough to cover her mortgage shortfall, as we left to the sounds of 'GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR PURCHASE'.
That £5 a month they're now paying him for free is going towards my gin fund, incidentally. And after bringing all my ID paperwork with me, they had just looked up the electoral roll and so my actual role in this was to sit staring into middle distance with a faraway look, planning a rewrite of a tense Mexican stand-off which had sod-all to do with whether the character passed a credit check. (He wouldn't, because he's a bit of a douche.)
I suppose I could make some incisive commentary here about how there's some kind of weird obsession down here with 'career' and 'regular job that we understand' and 'vacuous aspirational bullshit that replaces having an actual life', but- oh wait I just did. There we are. Ah well. It does give me an excuse to have other sufferers of 'mortgage' over to drink wine and cry and then laugh at Terrible Real Estate Agent Photos. So that's nice.
Also available at cryptogirl.dreamwidth.org :D
We went with Pete's bank, best known in the UK for having adverts where terrified employees are cajoled into forming a cheerful choir and ruining musical classics. Up until now, Pete was dealing with the financial side of things, for several reasons:
- He's good at it, being a prudent Yorkshireman
- It's a legitimate use for 'I'm sorry, my husband deals with the household finances'. Sorry, feminism.
- Using the above excuse because dealing with finance in general makes me want to gouge my own face off with a rusty spoon.
Despite this, we decided it should be a joint application because I'd quite like to help chip into bricks and mortar in whatever small way I can. So it was that we ended up in a very grim office with a cheerful woman named Catherine who hadn't actually expected I'd turn up. Good start.
The first unfortunate issue was that it seems nobody applies for mortgages in England to buy houses not in England. She was wholly unaware of the differences in the process in Scotland, and after I explained 'conclusion of missives' was basically exchanging contracts, she referred to it hereafter as 'whatever you called it', 'or whatever it is' and so on. There was also a lot of 'oh ignore that fee, I don't think you pay for surveyors but I'm not sure, lol Scotland'. *goes a tiny bit McGlashan*
The next thing that was clear is that if you're not in regular 9-5 full-time employment, you're going to get the third degree. My friend who's also househunting is getting a hard time with brokers because her PhD salary is paid termly and her teaching income is irregular. So don't be a freelancer or anything unconventional.
Pete put me down as 'homemaker'- no, sorry, 'Houseperson' as the politically-correct drop-down list said. Fair enough. During a lull in which Pete was calling the conveyancer, the world's most awkward moment happened:
Her: *smiles unsettlingly*
Me: *awkward smile*
Her: So, have you started looking for work?
Me: Erm, no. I might look when I'm up north.
Her: ._.
Me: ._.
Later, filling in some online forms:
Her: What sort of career are you aiming for in Scotland?
Now, at this point I considered saying a variety of things, from 'I'll find some freelance work to tide me over somehow', to 'I'll be finishing my book' to 'Put me down as Herder Of Watery Bastards And Delinquent Punks', to explaining I spent eight hours luring the latter out of my head with wall-to-wall Damned so I could finish some meta-story. But this is the Real World, you see.
Me: Well, I was a technical consultant, and then I was in publishing, so I don't know-
Her: I'LL JUST PUT YOU DOWN AS HOMEMAKER THEN.
Me: -_-
Oh yes, the online forms. Pete clocked the creaky Celeron-powered Lenovo on the floor fuelling the highly-advanced process. Yes, you're way ahead of me; it was running XP and IE6. This would be bad enough, if it wasn't for the fact that all of these things happened:
- A serious-looking error dialog popped up. She clicked through it. When we pointed it out, she just said 'Oh, that happens all the time. We just cancel it'. YOU JUST CANCEL IT.
- Every single page took a decade to load. She said it might be because $OtherBank who took them over simply tacked on their legacy systems and didn't bother updating them or anything. I can quite believe it. WELL THAT AND YOUR BROWSER SMELLS OF WEE.
- When printing stopped working, she took the reasoned approach of taking a screenshot with PrtScr, pasting it into a new Outlook email, then printing it from there, helpfully cutting off all the relevant costs column in the process. I realise this is one step away from The Wooden Table.
- Her email signature was in Comic Sans. This was when I urged sweet death to steal me away into more Calibri-fonted lands.
- And when it all got too awkward, she added 'But you work in computers, don't you? You're probably used to this!' *imagines husband slouched over a Windows XP machine, coding a storm up in FrontPage, sobbing quietly*
She then gave us the talk about critical illness/life insurance. Most of it was aimed at me. Because I have no job you see. A worrying amount of time was taken on how great it would be when Pete got hit by a bus and the mortgage would be instantly paid off and then I would be happy. Then again, there was a flipchart on the desk open at the page breaking down claims for critical illness and the high percentage of cancer rates by gender, so we're already into morbid territory. If I ever hear 'guesstimate', 'target life bracket' or 'ek-cetera' again, I'm going to murder everyone around me. STOP BUZZWORDING ME, BRO.
Then she vanished, returning with a man worryingly similar in appearance to Uncle Fester. He also wanted to talk to us about death. He told us about how we shouldn't rely on employer benefits because even though the bank had employed him 'for donkey's years' they could 'drop me tomorrow' and then what would little Mary-Sue do because she's only 6 and you have kids yes? He assured us their uncompetitive deal covered things like depression, a feeling that was starting to wash over me the more he threatened us with statistics. Did you know 20% of people claim in the first 5 years, presumably PTSD from sitting through all this wank.
During this litany Cath had returned with yet another person, and they both stood over my chair rustling papers and wearing the same fake smile I imagine the factory glues onto them when they're constructed. At this point I'm not sure if I'm about to be carted off as a ritual sacrifice or whether everyone's about to have a big mortgage dance party. Actually, it was just that Pete had to 'upgrade' his current account in order to have the mortgage.
This process could have taken 5 minutes, if she hadn't tried to persuade me to switch our joint account to them or list benefits we'll never use with the fee-paying account we'll never take. Depressingly, the walls were so thin I could hear a Polish lady pleading with the adviser next door that her Tesco salary was enough to cover her mortgage shortfall, as we left to the sounds of 'GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR PURCHASE'.
That £5 a month they're now paying him for free is going towards my gin fund, incidentally. And after bringing all my ID paperwork with me, they had just looked up the electoral roll and so my actual role in this was to sit staring into middle distance with a faraway look, planning a rewrite of a tense Mexican stand-off which had sod-all to do with whether the character passed a credit check. (He wouldn't, because he's a bit of a douche.)
I suppose I could make some incisive commentary here about how there's some kind of weird obsession down here with 'career' and 'regular job that we understand' and 'vacuous aspirational bullshit that replaces having an actual life', but- oh wait I just did. There we are. Ah well. It does give me an excuse to have other sufferers of 'mortgage' over to drink wine and cry and then laugh at Terrible Real Estate Agent Photos. So that's nice.
Also available at cryptogirl.dreamwidth.org :D