“My cell phone does work internationally.”
That was the second email I sent about the house from Europe. The first one asked why I was receiving a delinquency letter when I had paid the mortgage every month and signed the extension forms I had been given.
The answer was buried in the structure of the construction loan. The notice was not about a missed payment. The house had gone past its expected completion date, and the lender's system had started generating letters while the renovation kept going.
The house in Poughkeepsie was still a wreck in progress. It had moved beyond the earliest demolition, but it was nowhere near finished. The bathroom vanity had arrived, at least according to the tracking page. Wall tile was waiting at Home Depot. I needed the contractor to confirm that both had actually made it into the house.
I sent that checklist from the road and asked if we could meet the weekend after I returned. I wanted to see the work in person and make the next round of decisions.
Amanda and I had left New York for Berlin. We walked along the remaining sections of the Wall, went up the television tower, and took a ridiculous number of nearly identical selfies in the sun. From there we went to Prague and then Warsaw. There were apartment confirmations, train plans, unfamiliar street names, and a lot of looking up at buildings.
We did not have a grand theory for the trip. We picked a route, kept moving east, and gave ourselves enough time to wander around each place without trying to turn every hour into an attraction.
I also sent a one-line note to a friend in Berlin: “I'm on my way to Berlin for a couple days - you around?”
He was leaving for Los Angeles as I arrived. We figured out that our schedules might cross when I came back through Berlin before flying home. Even on vacation, the route was being revised in an email thread.
Aaptiv had not disappeared either.
The company was growing quickly, and most of the hiring work touched the technology and product teams I was building. Before leaving, I followed up with a recruiter I had first spoken with in March. We got on the phone the morning of the flight. The conversation went well, and I handed the introduction to the person leading the search before heading to the airport.
That was the clean handoff. The house was not as clean.
I had checked the vanity tracking. I had copied the exact pickup reminder for the tile. I had proposed a date to meet the contractor. Then the lender's email landed, using a word that made the situation sound much worse than I understood it to be.
I wrote back from Europe. I explained that the home was still under construction, that the mortgage had been paid, and that I would be back Monday. Then I asked for a call because waiting through another email cycle was not going to make the notice any clearer.
This was not a clever system for working remotely. It was a vacation with several active projects refusing to observe the vacation.
Amanda and I still had the trip. We were out walking, eating, taking pictures, and moving from one city to the next. At the same time, I was trying to keep a recruiting process moving and make sure a vanity, a box of tile, a contractor, and a lender stayed connected to the same unfinished house.
Nothing was resolved by the end of that morning. I had asked for the call, the contractor had a list, and the recruiting introduction was in somebody else's hands. That was enough to put the phone away and go back outside.