Mistakes have been made

The bankers

TD Canada Trust has made some pretty spectacular mistakes with my mortgage over the months. It’s my first-ever mortgage so it took me awhile to notice.

For starters, they took my first few mortgage payments out of someone else’s account. This worked well for me, but somebody, somewhere, must have complained.

Then they failed to execute an instruction last winter which would have increased my mortgage payments and decreased my ammortization period by four years. (And I didn’t notice until 8 months later when I went to increase my mortgage payments again, and wondered why the impact was negligible.)

Then they said they had no idea how they came up with the amount of my bi-weekly mortgage payments, and were unable to determine whether my interest rate was 5.9% or 5.4%. They asked me to check my files for the original paperwork and let them know. They were also mystified about why they had been overcharging me by $40 a month on property taxes.

But the woman I deal with is genuinely nice, and so apologetic. The other day she pounded away on her calculator for five minutes and then gave me $38.10 by way of compensation for these screw-ups. In cash. Because she couldn’t figure out how to apply it to my mortgage. So sweet.

The roofers

Remember a few weeks ago I showed you some photos of my newly shingled roof, and asked if it looked okay? I ended up contacting Sanderson Roofing, who did the job, and describing to them what it looked like and asking if I ought to be concerned. The nice man said they would send someone to my home immediately, right that minute, to inspect it, and then they’d call me at work to let me know what they thought.

A week later I still hadn’t heard anything, so I called them back.

“Oh,” said another nice man, “we sent a crew over to your place last Thursday and they re-shingled the part that wasn’t done right.”

Hmmm. So I checked it out that night after work, and sure enough, they’d reshingled it. But they hadn’t reshingled the part I was concerned about; they’d reshingled the entire edge, from front to peak, where it tied into the neighbour’s roof. (I was concerned about a row of shingles near the front that seemed not to be lying flat, and which still seems not to be lying flat.)

At any rate, I find it much easier to tolerate – and overlook – mistakes when it’s friendly, good-natured, genuinely apologetic people making them. I am a sucker for anyone who can say “I’m sorry, it’s my fault, please let me fix it.” The world needs more people like that.