The original words of Phanes, tirelessly carved into a slab of "No'".

Downtime, Moving, Wallets, Dogs and Real Estate

Well, the move is over.

It took a month. By day it’s settle into my new #dayjob, a nice 9-5 as an Information Security Architect at a prestigious institution — and by night, it’s sleeves rolled up packing and cleaning.

Both knees are blown. Back is surprisingly in good shape.

I eventually just ran out of time but got the big stuff.

Definitely not getting that deposit back. Between the huge task of training a puppy that I was not prepared for, and dealing with a death in the family, and career shifting, and the fact that the place was so tiny, I’m just happy to take the losses I did on that place.

During the month of moving hell I learned some things. First, the Columbus real estate market is incredibly competitive — to the point that I bumped into a few scammers along the way. One was with some up and coming property mogul where you get the access code on their website when you go to view the property. The way the scam works is someone will pretend to own the house, use their website to get the code, and act as a relay, then take the person’s money prior to disappearing on closure. I didn’t fall for that one and ended up reporting it, but a different one got me — HER Realtors. The way this one worked is they eat up a month of your time going through the screening process and then fubar the credit report so they can take a 300 dollar holding fee from multiple residents on the same property. Caught the guy red-handed and attorney is in tow because they violated the FCRA by misreporting credit. It’s rather clever because they drag the whole thing out so long that by the time you realize its a con you’re desperate to sign somewhere, so you’re less likely to have the time to follow up with suit. Never bank on a lack of free time from someone who pathologically fails at time management, though. For clarity this wasn’t HER Realty but one of their partner organizations, Trinity Real Estate Group.

Irregardless, I found a great condo in a nice community. It’s HOA so I’d never consider buying it but it’s a great place to live when you don’t report to the HOA permanently. I’d never consider owning property that had compulsory HOA membership, nice condo or not.

This place really reminds me alot of Air Force base housing. The irony!

It has a gated community feel. Everything’s painted bright white. All my neighbors walk their dogs around the neighborhood and socialize each other’s pets. Luigi is doing poorly at this but it’s perfect timing for him.

Speaking of Luigi, he’s mastered escaping from those iron cross-bar training crates and loves to tear the place apart, destroying everything I own while I’m at work. He’s gone through three crates now. The newest one looks like it’s holding him for now. He’s caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage in the last month.

So, the move went well until the very last night. Day 30, I wake up and my wallet is missing. I call a friend over to tear the place apart to try to find it. Nothing.

I ended up having to cancel all my cards and had to miss 2 days of work to go to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and get dragged around not one but two states’ embarrassingly parachronistic license management and traffic court systems. Apparently there were two tickets, both over a year old, that I had forgotten about, one of which was in New York, the other was at 2am, that were issuing blocks on my license so a reprint was not possible without great maneuvering.

All in all though, it all got taken care of, and as I type here, while sipping some fine espresso from my personal espresso machine, on my Razer Huntsman Elite keyboard (which is worth every penny), I can’t help but savor the taste of win.

It was actually eye opening for a day there where I had canceled all my cards and had no proof of identity, so, no access to funds. You’d be surprised to learn how much you use those things when you can’t.

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The Personal Blog of Chris Punches