A certain local newspaper by the name of the Florida Agitator has an op-ed piece where they give out darts and laurels for notable (one way or the other) people, companies, events, etc.

Here, if anyone cares are this week’s dart’s and laurels (sorry, the Darts ran a little long, going to extend this one).

h3. Laurels

• Dell - Gets an it-doesnt-get-any-cheaper-or-faster-than-that-and-I-mean-that-in-a-good-way laurel for the new computer arriving at my office tomorrow. $500 (including tax, and shipping, but after two rebates) for a stripped down dimension 3000 with 3 years of replacement warranty, and a lovely 19″ LCD ordered very late tuesday night, shipped wednesday and arriving Friday with the slowest listed shipping? Heck yeah, you gotta love that.
• CyberXLink - Is the proud recipient of a WS laurel for their quick service and great prices of the wallplate and keystone network jacks that came today and will be installed in the new house if the network cable actually arrives (see CPUtopia below)

Darts

• CPUtopia.com - Gets a very painfully delayed dart shoved their way for not only giving me a tracking number four days ago that to this day still does not register on UPS’ site, but also for not even answering the two emails I’ve sent in the last two days asking them why that’s the case.

This was going to be a bulleted item too, but it ran so long it should be a post on its own, so appologies in advance.

Bank of America - The big daddy of darts goes out to the big daddy of banks today. I’d never ever recommend BoA for mortgage services to ANYONE. I foolishly thought that I’d get decent service since I already had an account with them. Unfortunately, the entire process has been mediocre at the high-points, and horrible in the rest. There’s a local mortgage agent at a branch that we worked with and we also have someone at the mortgage office in Jacksonville that is working on our mortgage. That’s a great idea. Unfortunately, great ideas like that only work if, say, you can actually get in touch with either of them. I think Jaime and I have left 3-4 messages over the last few weeks for folks in the Jacksonville office, and gotten a whopping 1 call in return. And the person who called wasn’t even the person who was supposed to be helping us. Our local guy is easier to contact, but he let too many things slide and made us do way more than we should have had to do; calling him up to ask what he needed from us instead of trusting him to actually tell us. Of course, if they did their job well and there were no issues the bad communication wouldn’t really matter as much.

I think you see where this is going. We were scheduled to close tomorrow morning at 10am. I’ve got the day off work, Jaime’s got the day off work and we’ve been getting things together ready to go over to the new house and work on it for a while now. Except our bank apparently hadn’t actually sent the paperwork over to the Seller’s title company, until late this evening. That’s sort of a problem when Fedex guarantees delivery only by 11:30 and the title company needs the paperwork a day in advance to prepare it for the 10am closing.

The worst part is that nobody from BoA calls us to tell us this. Our realtor (Jeff Tice, who’s already gotten his own Laurel on this blog, or he’d get another for this latest help) was calling around trying to make sure everything was good to go when the problem comes out. We found out at 4pm the day before we were supposed to close.

That’s freaking ridiculous. Our planned 4 day weekend of work on our new house is now blown and we’ve got to scramble around to adjust all the timing related issues (utility turn-ons scheduled for tomorrow, the fact that our storage box containing some extra furniture is only good until Monday, etc) and we might have not even heard there was a problem if our realtor wasn’t keeping a sharp eye out. Suffice to say, we’re pretty pissed. With TWO people from the bank supposedly working on this, you think somebody might have noticed that the proper documents weren’t going to be 24 hours late and have had the blankity-blank common courtesy to at least give us a call.

Combine that with the fact that we now have to reschedule and Jaime’s job is very inflexible for time off and you’ve got some very pissed off folks. After a lot of frantic calls back and forth we’ve resheduled things for first thing tuesday morning, but they’ve got to make a special exception so Jaime can show up to sign the papers early before she starts work and I’ll do the rest of the closing myself later that morning.

Bah, who said writing in a journal was supposed to help you deal with anger? I’m getting more pissed off the more I think about this. Stopping now before it gets worse.

Posted by Jordan on Thursday, May 26th, 2005 at 9:32 pm.