May 2nd

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST!

Another mortgage company. Not really interesting in and of itself since it's just one of hundreds of large companies, and probably thousands of small ones, that have vanished since 2006. What makes it interesting to me is that I applied for a job there and actually had an interview a few months ago.

The phone interviewer was very impressed with my resume, and had almost signed me up for training starting that week. When I got there for the face-to-face interview I was first kept waiting in the lobby for an hour past my appointment time. Then the person I was supposed to meet was "busy", so I was interviewed by someone else. Suddenly it appeared that they had hired all the necessary people for their first ramp-up. Maybe it was because I uttered a comment that the future of any mortgage business wasn't all that secure, and that it would perhaps depend on whether or not the various government stimuli worked, among other things.

"Oh no! We have built in leads from the loans we service. We have plenty of business, we will be growing."

Optimism in defiance of reality. This company used to be a big sub-prime lender. According to the interviewer they no longer did sub-prime, and all the new business that was going to be so big was refinancing their current borrowers. Uh-HELLO? You think that you can refinance your sub-prime crap into prime mortgages?

Yeah, right. You'll be going, not growing. And, in all honesty I probably didn't get the job because I'm not 20 something and my mammaries are no longer perky.

If employers want experienced and intelligent they may have to get over the mammary fetish. But, if I had gotten that job I'd once again be unemployed and no better off than I was before.

RIP-Jack Kemp

I just read that Jack Kemp has died. I was a big fan of his when he was the quarterback for the Chargers when I was little. In 1972 I lived for a summer in Bethesda MD (I was a government intern, but not in the White House) and the Kemps lived right across the street. Mrs. Kemp baked us a cake (apple spice) to welcome us to the neighborhood. I never actually met him, but I did get to watch him toss a football to his son out in the street. My father called me to the window. "Look at that! He's out there in the street doing for free what we used to pay good money to see in San Diego."

Maybe he can toss around a few footballs with my father now. Or, talk politics since they would have agreed completely with each other.