Hello All, I wanted to share a recent experience that has me questioning if there was more I could have done to avoid getting unassigned from a signing. Last week, I had accepted a buyer loan signing right here in my home town, about 10 minutes away from my home office, which was scheduled for this morning. I had countered the original fee and was awarded the higher fee for the job, given my good track record with the signing service in question. The Title company did not have docs ready until late in the day, yesterday. This was a hybrid signing, so the package was only about 80 pages, which included about 10 pages which were carried over from the seller package. The first PDF file was unprintable. Every time I clicked print, it spooled for about 5-7 minutes, then spit out an error message indicating that the file could not be printed. I reached back out to the signing company and they had title send me a new file which I could print.
The new PDF printed out somewhat splotchy. The quality of the docs which they scanned together into the PDF was very low and, though the print-outs were legible, the scans of the signed docs would have had obvious splotches that would have caused the scans to be rejected. I pointed this out to the signing company and even attached a sample scan from my end, showing how bad the splotches looked. I asked to see if title could redo the docs so that I could keep my end of the contract and return to them a legible, properly executed, and stamped set of docs. I pointed out that a HUD-1 that title sent after the fact printed perfectly, even though the main PDF did not. However, their response to me was to either find a way to print that PDF so that scans would be legible, or concede to having the work order reassigned to another notary. Ultimately, I conceded and I was promptly unassigned from the job.
I’ve only run into this splotchy printout issue a handful of times. Thankfully, in most instances, I wasn’t required to provide scans so I got away with just shipping docs as is and was paid my full fee as those signings all closed without issue. The one time that I did have to provide scans, the signing company (a different one from the one in question today) asked me for pics from my phone and we used those to confirm that the docs were legible enough to pass muster with title.
Setting aside my personal feelings about being summarily unassigned from this job, or how this will impact my ability to get future work from the signing company in question, has anyone else ever run into this kind of issue? If so, how did you resolve it? Is there a way to print a cleaner looking version of a splotchy PDF? Maybe a setting that I am not aware of? For context, I use the free version of Adobe, so my options within that software are extremely limited in what I can do with a given doc. Any advice or opinions are welcome!