Vacation

It's official. It's decided.

I'm on vacation.

:-O !!! Hey! Wait a minnit! Just how can I be on vacation if I don't actually work?!?

Easy answer. I'm on vacation from my regular life.

No duties. No responsibilities. Minimal medical fuss. (relatively speaking, of course.)

When I worked liquidating the failed banks, handling a way over-specs portfolio of the messiest delinquent commercial loans and beat-up real estate owned, people would ask me sometimes what my favorite part of the job was.

You see, the profession of *bankbuster,* *liquidator,* *commercial loan workout specialist,* *contrarian asset manager,* whatever they call us at whatever time it smells just as sweet - that profession is both emotionally stressful, and multi-disciplinary, to great extremes. It's a job that many apparently qualified folks simply can't handle.

Every now and then, we'd get a New Guy in, a banker perhaps. Someone in a nice suit with a respectable resume. They'd come to work and get their first portfolio on a Monday. They'd look that portfolio over, maybe read some loan files, field a few phone calls. They'd watch and listen to the rest of us buzzing about, dealing with the constant emergencies, *putting out fires* - the day-to-day norm of our work - and talking in our impenetrable jargon, just like others do in their own professions.

After a couple of days of work, they'd suddenly and quietly disappear off into the sunset. This often occurred on a Wednesday.

Frequently they'd leave no forwarding information. No address. No phone number. They wouldn't even pick up their two-day paycheck for the time they'd worked.

Their poor abandoned portfolio would float around in the Black Hole of orphaned portfolios for awhile. Maybe a piece or two, some particularly egregious accounts, would get parceled out to some of us for temporary custody. You know. Accounts with serious problems that need a lot of intense management as of yesterday? Yes. You can just hear the groans and sighs of us long-suffering, already overburdened asset managers as we spied a new foundling on our doorstep, can't you?

Then we'd entertain ourselves making up and trading rumors about where that Disappeared Asset Manager landed. One extremely large person, dubbed *Earthquake* due to his great poundage, was especially fun. A sneaky bcc-type memo would pop up from no one in particular, circulate throughout Major Assets, maybe even trickle its way down to Auto Loans. *New Sighting! Earthquake's been spotted in ______ [state] doing [_____]* - something that had NOTHING to do with failed banks or even finance, of course…

Eventually, perhaps several months down the line, we might actually even find them. (I mean, we did a lot of skip-tracing of delinquent borrowers. We knew how to find an escaped former coworker pretty fast, if we really wanted to.) We'd *volunteer* some one of us to call that truant up to say, --Hi! Hey, howya doin'? how's the weather out there?-- But they'd shy away from their phone like a spooked horse, wouldn't even take our friendly call. heh!

Multidisciplinary. No individual person could be great at every possible aspect of our work. That meant that as co-workers, we were all far better off if we truly were a team. We'd ask and answer questions and get advice from each other.

Here's a brief overview of a few of the subjects we needed a good general acquaintance with: negotiation, banking, financial analysis, real estate management, real estate repair and rehab, forms of business ownership, discovering the *real* people behind closely-held corporations and/or partnerships, determining both personal and non-human financial liability for loans and guarantees, PMI, VA and HUD mortgage guarantee and/or insurance programs, fiduciary responsibilities, accounting, insurance on property, Errors & Omissions (E&O), Directors and Officers (D&O), and more, civil and criminal law, real estate and banking law, bankruptcy law, asset searches, fraud investigation, zoning, construction loan disbursements, the peculiarities of programs like UDAG grants, property inspections, real estate title issues, negotiation, local government laws and rules and regulations on everything from grass-cutting liens to maintenance of roads in abandoned developments, market analysis, employment and economic analysis, appraisal analysis, inheritance, HOAs and condo boards, laws and regulations on seizures of everything from real estate to chattels to bank accounts, foreclosure, every type of bankruptcy under the sun, long-arm statutes for collection across state lines, how to drop everything you're doing and answer a *congressional* (inquiry), real estate tax deed redemption, negotiation, post-foreclosure deficiency, income taxes whether personal, business, or non-profit, financial analyses and resolutions for religious entities, alternative uses for such properties as abandoned churches, skip tracing, marketing, real estate sales, taking depositions, discovery, government bidding procedures for appraisals and engineering studies and title disputes and the like, auctions, dealing with hazardous materials found on properties owned, pledged or seized, our legal *delegation of authority* rules strictly governing our roles as government banking officers, quoting chapter and verse of *The Bible* (meaning, the Credit Manual), how to write all this up and present it to Committee for approval, how to actually get that approval - without which, of course, one could resolve nothing at all - and did I say negotiation?...

I loved to bury myself in some particularly messy account. Something consisting of, say, $5.22 M book value but only $323,000 current value, contained in two entire upright file cabinets, construction loan disbursements after *inspections* certifying the work was x% complete - even though it was still underwater swampland to this day, and where the heck did those phony photos come from anyway?, heh! - and with ownership interests by eight now-defunct corporations including one s-corp, plus a general partnership and two limited partnerships; but secured only by the low-value real estate, two corporations, five personal guarantees including two by wives who had no idea what they were signing - which is no excuse from liability but is a bit pitiful sometimes - and one by a so-called farmer (who was also, incidentally, a former bank board member) using his 5-acre non-farm house plot to hide behind a Chapter 12 (farmer's) *cramdown* bankruptcy, and two worthless third mortgages, one on a corporate president's house and the other on a corporate treasurer's house; and yes the General Partner's liable too, even if the fool still thinks he's exempt just because he neither guaranteed it nor signed as an individual, but what the heck did he think General Partner means anyway, that's pretty basic law there, if you wanna be a limited partner then don't be a General Partner...

and a week later I'd come up for air, my fancy silk business suit all covered with cobwebs and dust, and me all covered with paper cuts and a sly grin, to gleefully announce I'd found a good and viable $100,000 avenue of collection others had missed for the last two years of resolution attempts because it was SO buried in that paperwork...

I loved that job, myself. This was clear and obvious to everyone around me. Asking me what my *favorite* part of the job was, that made sense. It was a real curiosity. I could see that.

My answer?

Vacation.

I LOVE vacation!