Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta

I was realizing that working for a bank rather than a broker meant fewer assholes could cause me grief.  Instead of dealing with underwriters and closers from 30 different companies,  I only had to deal with those assholes in my company.  The downside was that since I had to actually know these people, as in meet them face to face and have a working relationship, it was expected that I wouldn't tell them that they were, in fact, raging assholes.  I functioned o.k. with this expectation to some degree, I didn't stand up and yell, "You Lie" at office meetings nor did I call anyone a nasty word to their face but I did not hide my disdain for the Bank of Hell or its employees well.

I really just wanted to get my customers loans and go to happy hour but the Mortgage Devil and the Bank of Hell had other expectations of me.  The first being that I would do virtually all the work on my loans, even if it was the work of my loan processor and underwriter.  For those who don't know, most loan officers take the application from the customer and counsel the customer on what they should provide in terms of documentation (when there was any) to get their loan through underwriting and approved.  The loan processor and underwriter are to verify all the information on the application, request additional supporting documentation, and send out forms like verifications of employment or rental history.  The idea behind loan officers not doing these sorts of tasks is that it creates an opportunity for fraud and in fact, most company policies would have prohibited loan officers from doing this.  Policies and rules were there but, in practice, well that is another story.

The power struggle begins.  I don't want to do the jobs of my processor and underwriter, not because I was infuriated by the ethical aspect, no really, I just didn't want to be bothered with it.  It wasn't my job to do it and so I didn't.  This made many of my loan settlements last minute fire drills.  My typical week would be four days of boredom followed by 1 day of frantic phone calls, panic, and unimaginable stress.

My lack of willingness to do her job pissed off my bat shit crazy underwriter/processor who complained to my operations manager about my lack of support for her.  The phone call went like this:

Ops Manager:  "Bat shit crazy says that your loan files are incomplete and you are making it hard for her to get through your loans."

Turdy :  "Hmmmm."

Ops Manager:  "This is a serious problem, why do you think you are so special that you shouldn't have to do the extra work."

Turdy :  "Well I guess that would be because none of the other loan officers have to do this stuff and I am pretty damn special."

Ops Manager:  Not amused...."Well if we could ever get you to training in Dante's Inferno I think it would solve the problem."

Turdy:  "The Mortgage Devil told me when he hired me that I would not have to attend this loan officer academy and I'm not planning on it."

Ops Manager:  "He can't make that decision, it is mandatory for all loan officers."

Turdy:  "Well be that as it may, I'm not going.  He promised me and he can get me out of it."

Ops Manager:  Sigh....Huff...."I have never had this much of a problem getting someone to corporate for training."

Turdy:  "See, I am special."

(Sound of Opertions Manager slamming her phone down)

This training thing was a joke.  If I had gone to Dante's Inferno and the loan officer academy, I wouldn't have been trained on how things actually functioned at the Mortgage Devil's branches.  Instead, I would have been trained on how the company wanted things done which was completely at odds with the real experience of working where I was at.  The Mortgage Devil had his own set of rules and procedures that you would not find in the company's manual.(more on that later.)

In the end, I never went to the five day loan officer training in Dante's Inferno.  I was of the mindset that if they fired me for not going it would be a blessing and I dug in my heels and refused to do what they told me.  After a few months at Bank of Hell I basically ignored everything local management told me to do, sometimes because what they were asking was unethical and sometimes just because I felt like being an asshole.  My attitude about the whole thing is best summed up by one of my favorite lines from the movie Office Space: 

"The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care."