i got up an hour early this morning to meet another mortgage lender in harvard square, at au bon pain. i bought a cup of freshly squeezed orange juice and went around peering at tables, trying to identify this mortgage broker whom i've never met before. finally we did catch each other, wasn't too hard to miss, we were the only two guys who looked lost. we talked for about 20 minutes, i gave him a bunch of info, he showed me what kind of mortgage programs he had to offer. a case of small world syndrome, but he was actually the same guy who did the financing for the current occupants of the condo i'm buying, he told me that because he immediately recognized the address when i told it to him. unfortunately i wasn't able to proceed any further with the paperwork as i had already filed a mortgage with cambridgeport savings bank yesterday. i told him in the event that my application gets rejected by the bank, i'll come back to him, or if i want to shop around a little bit more, because mortgage brokers traditionally have lower interest rates on 30-year fixed loans (the kind of loan i'm getting). he said not to worry, but with my "perfect credit rating" i shouldn't have any problems getting a loan. that made me feel good! perfect credit! how that's happened i will never know. i've never really used a credit card before, i do all my transactions via my fleet debit card. i don't have any debts other than my $100/month student loan. i have very little credit history, if any at all. despite that fact, somehow i have perfect credit. it's like going to the dentist and the dentist telling you that you have perfect teeth. it's just a good feeling.
leaving harvard square, i arrived at work 15-20 minutes early. originally i thought i'd be late for work, and had already rehearsed in my mind what i was going to tell them. i went downstairs first, force of habit, and nobody was around except for carrie working. we chatted briefly before i went upstairs, about her own apartment searching and how its such a scam. what then followed was 13 hours of work, with me finally departing the office at 10pm. i won't go into any details but towards the end of the night there was a lot of swearing, hair pulling, and coding with my eyes half closed.
for lunch i skipped the office meal just so i could go out and get some sunshine. if i didn't have all this work to do and if i had access to a car, i'd have left work right then and there, maybe tried persuading people from the office to come join me, and drive out to the beach to stand ankle deep in the atlantic ocean (ankle deep because i can't swim). it was a very good day. and very good days on very bad days end up becoming very bad days themselves. i walked myself to the truck stop where i got two slices of pepperoni pizza because they didn't have anymore mushrooms. like a zombie, i shuffled back to the office, finding a wooden bench seat on the sixth street path and sat down to enjoy my drab slices of greasy truck pizza. i would've had a bleak lunch were it not for eliza jones sudden appearance, fresh from lunch buying herself at au bon pain, all dressed up in her spring colors. i coaxed her into having a seat, and though it wasn't her original intention, she ended up eating her lunch with me as well. we talked about how much we enjoyed working late nights. she elaborated a little bit more on how her cat kooky was sprayed by a skunk yesterday. i discovered she can be a messy eater, first borrowing half then eventually all of my truck napkin. with our food consumed, we ran out of excuses to stay out any longer so we both went back to work. that was about 2pm. we still had 8 more hours of work to go.
when i came back from lunch i saw there was a message on my phone. i checked, and it was cambridgeport savings bank woman calling me back and letting me know i'd be able to qualify for the federal first-time buyer loan program. that's good news because the interest rate on that mortgage is very low. first i learn i have perfect credit, and now i find out i qualify for this program. on the work front it wasn't such a good day, but house buying wise it wasn't so bad. now the next step is to sit back and let cambridgeport savings bank appraise the condominium and have them get back to me on whether or not they'll approve me for the mortgage amount i want.
sometime after 5pm i wandered downstairs, just to take a break from staring at the monitor all day long. after finishing a small bag of potato chips, i went back upstairs, but not before bumping into joel who was visiting the office to see his friend dan.
as fulltime employees we don't get any overtime pay but we do get free dinner. we ordered thai, i got the crispy chicken pad thai. todd brought up my food when it arrived. i ate alone upstairs while everyone else ate together downstairs. the food wasn't bad, a little bit too sweet, and could've used some hot sauce. after the 10-15 minutes it took me to eat my dinner (that time i will make sure to deduct from my timesheet), i went back to work.
i was kind of amazed with my coding endurance. usually i reach a certain period where my mind just quits. however, not so tonight. even though i was tired, i got to a point where i was just on autopilot, like i was watching myself work from a distance. i was in a groove, i wasn't straining that muscle up in my head too much. occasionally i thought about the people downstairs and how they were doing with their stuff. man, it's lonely at the top!
actually, sam and scott were upstairs as well (working on a different project), and they stayed pretty late but left around 8pm. i didn't realize it but james had been hiding in his office all day and only came out to see who was still left. we chatted briefly about cellphones (he's thinking about getting one), he fixed one of my action figures and gave it a slight repaint job, and he bought me a bottle of canada dry from the soda machine. at 10pm i called it quits and got a ride from my father who was just getting out of work himself.