Well, that stunk. Finding out after six weeks that we aren’t going to be able to move into the home we thought we would is not fun. The thing is, in hindsight, there were red flags that our loan officer wasn’t going to be able to deliver what he said he could. I’m not saying he was solely responsible for the deal souring – the tax snafu obviously played a HUGE role in that –  but he nonetheless conducted himself in a way that didn’t strike me as very professional.

The most annoying thing that he did was tell us – on four different occasions – that he would be able to make the loan work if we did A, B, C, and D, and then, once we did what he asked, changed his tune and said it wouldn’t work after all.

There were smaller things that annoyed me too, things which may not seem like a big deal on the surface, but didn’t exactly engender great confidence in me, the customer. And the disturbing thing is that more and more people conduct their business this way these days.

RED FLAG #1: E-Mail

I get that E-mail has revolutionized how people converse. It’s a casual form of communication, and allows people to eschew the formal rules of old school letter-writing. That’s totally awesome when writing to friends, but when writing business correspondence? Not so much. A typical E-mail from Mr. Loan looked like this:

“hey send me thatt doc we talked abt earlier”

Yes, often these messages were sent from his Blackberry, but that doesn’t excuse the message’s tossed off nature in my eyes. More and more I get emails like this from people I am conducting business with, and I don’t like it. Important business emails shouldn’t look like a text from a junior high kid.

RED FLAG #2: Phone Etiquette

Lately people have begun to treat business calls with the same casualness as their emails, and this guy definitely is one of them. Many calls started something like this:

“Hey, Bro, listen, here’s the deal.”‘

Bro? I was also called “dude” and “man.” That would be fine if we were in a frat together, but I don’t like it coming from a businessman I am entrusting with a deal worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

RED FLAG #3: Accessibility

Lastly, getting this guy on the phone was almost impossible. Our real estate agent was driven up the wall with how every time she called, his line went straight to voice mail. I swear he was like a teenager screening his calls. Voice mail, like Email, is an awesome invention, but it isn’t supposed to be the default setting for all your phone calls.

Okay. Rant over. This has just been a long process that ended up with us being no closer to having a home than when we started, and I am grumpy. But seriously… is anyone else disturbed by the decline of decorum in business? Or do I just need to accept that this is how business is going to be done now and in the future?