A Bit of Tedium

Trey Smith

As another workweek comes to a close, Della and I still live in South Bend with no set destination beyond. Supposedly, our application to the apartment complex in Westport is just a few mere days away from being approved, but we have heard this same tune for more than one month now. If this process continues to lag on for another week or two, we will need to start applying to other destinations again.

This past week we finally learned what the big hold up is. There is a certain form that, by rule, must be filled out a certain way, but our information doesn't fit and the HUD compliance officer appears to be an individual who is a stickler for filling out forms the proper way. The two lines on the form that are causing the delay ask for the name and address of an applicant's mortgage company. Our "problem" is that we don't have a mortgage "company". Our loan is through the USDA (US Department of Agriculture). In other words, the US government holds our loan.

Even worse, there is no one loan officer that we deal with. If a person were to call the USDA Servicing Center 100 times, chances are great that each call would be handled by a different person. This is the way a modern bureaucracy works. Unfortunately, that doesn't meet the requirements of the aforementioned form either.

It has become very obvious that neither the apartment complex manager nor the local HUD compliance officer has encountered applicants like us before. It is more than obvious that they have little or no experience with applicants who own a home through a USDA program. While one can certainly forgive them for the lack of this specific sort of experience, one would think that it wouldn't take them 6 weeks or more to figure out how to massage a government form!

But that is where we are and there is not a whole helluva a lot we can do about it. So, we wait and twiddle our thumbs.