WTF Mortgages: who's case is it?
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OK, so I was going to submit these stories to Alex and the crowd for the front page but after trying to write them up, two things occurred: firstly, they'd go through the 'creative' process and quite possibly lose the WTF attached, and secondly I wanted to tell these stories my own way because there is something about having been there that is integral to the WTFery.
Anyway. This particular tale is from my early days at WTF Mortgages as a mail monkey. Mail came into Loan Development Central and needed to be diverted to the regional teams. Now, since WTF Mortgages only ever dealt with mortgage brokers and estate agents, that meant using the brokers' addresses to determine region. So far so good.
When I started, there were four teams. I never did figure out how they arrived at these teams. My lot covered south Wales, the M4 corridor and the entirety of the north. No, it doesn't make any sense to me even now.
But anyway. The list of post code regions -> brokers was maintained by the sales folks, and that was fine. Every so often they'd email around that one post code was switching sales managers from time to time, and that was fine too.
Except for the computer system. Each mortgage application listed which broker had supplied it. But nowhere in that listing did it bother to list which team would deal with it.
So every time a case was input, a manual field was added to list the sales manager who was supposed to deal with the case, and thus by extension which team it was. Except in the 75% of cases when it wasn't added at input time, and had to be added by the mail monkeys, who also didn't always bother.
Just for fun, the mail monkeys could modify bits of an application but only until the formal mortgage offer was made, at which point we were no longer able to make such modifications. So if a case got that far without said initials, we'd have to ask one of the completions people to amend it.
Here's the bit that I never understood: there were fields internally attached to each broker to indicate which team was dealing with it because the sales reps used that information. But it was never exposed in the front end to the people who could actually make use of it. Or indeed to the other aspects of the system that really could have used it, but that's another WTF entirely.
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Wow this is reminding me of Halifax Plc in West Yorkshire region of England, where Geoffrey Boycoot is hailing from. Great commentator, not so great cricketer.
ETA: WTF Mortgages === Halifax Plc?
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WTF Mortgages === Halifax Plc?
Probably not. Wrong location, and they were a bigger operation.(There's quite a few mortgage lenders that effectively went out of business in the past few years. I'd estimate that most of these stories would apply to all the others; the identity of the firm isn't important now they won't be employing anyone or making further loans.)
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Correct, they are not Halifax Plc, nor are they making further loans. And yes, that's absolutely what happened, a number went out of business, including WTF Mortgages.
However, I know for a fact that some of the more hilarious WTFs to come were pretty much unique to WTF Mortgages, not that you'd actually know about it since it was mostly internal WTFery. You'll understand when I've written them up.
