LESSONS LEARNED and CHALLENGES
OF A NEW YORK NOTARY PUBLIC
November 12, 2009: Getting around New York City and Manhattan is becoming more and more difficult. In order to be able to receive your phone calls, we typically utilize the NYC transit bus system and thanks to Mr. Bloomberg we can no longer quickly get from the west side to the east side of Manhattan by cruising down Broadway as the mayor has thought it was necessary to give the tourists even more room by completely closing off parts of Broadway in midtown Manhattan to use as a pedestrian mall. This is a major street that cuts through the center of the city and now it's just gone. I cannot believe he could make such a major change in the city with our voting on it or having some say in the matter.
Also, the city continues to authorize these weekend street fairs that require complete rerouting of buses. These street fairs are hardly worth the trouble as they sell inferior products (such as 50 thread count sheets masquerading as 600-thread count sheets, hardened corn and mozzarella arepas that burn the flesh in your mouth).
August 15, 2009: The newest notary public challenge involves notarizing California documents in New York. California has created quite a mess with new standard notary wording that includes a sentence about the notary certifying under the penalty of perjury under the laws of the "state of California" that previous paragraphs are true and correct. The National Notary Association's (NNA) notary signing agent hotline states that New York notaries follow NY law, not California law, and that the notary should simply cross out the California wording and attach the NY wording or cross out the word "California" in the notary paragraph and replace it with "New York." But many California title companies are insisting that this will keep the document from being approved by their county clerk and that it HAS to have the perjury sentence in it WITH the word "California" left as is. Other title companies, however, say it's fine to attach the full New York wording or cross out the word "California" and replace it with "New York." The NNA says its the title companies that are creating this confusion and that no county clerk would actually reject a document with the wording of the notarized state attached or the incorrect state revised. So, now, notaries are stuck in the middle with no uniform rule, and we have one more issue to go over with customers. We are left to decide between doing the "right" thing (according to the NNA), or risk alienating a client, possibly holding up a loan closing and losing a lot of business. Hopefully, Governor Arnold will step in and clear up this chaos.
June 20, 2009: People have no idea how much more complicated this notary business is than meets the eye. Thanks to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, I have to now check whether a person's full name is going to be on their driver's license when I arrive to notarize a signature! Someone in charge there wasn't thinking things through when they decided to set aside one line for a person's name...not enough space for a lot of names. So the DMV had to abbreviate the person's name, sometimes their first name! Finally, in 2008, they started allotting 2 lines for people's names, but they sometimes forget to elongate the abbreviated name that they created pre-2008 on the new licenses. One client had to take a taxi to her house to retrieve her passport as a result of this DMV carelessness.
April 19, 2009: I learned this week how important it is to remind people that I need to see a current state-issued identification from New York or any other state or a passport (U.S. or with a U.S. entry stamp) in order to notarize a document. After asking 9 people to remember to bring it along, I often forget by the 10th person as I kind of assume people usually carry their ID around. I won't forget anymore. I arrived at a diner twice this week with only a few minutes to complete a notarization and both times they had no license and we had to go back to their homes to get it. It's hard to stay on schedule when this happens, so I now have a reminder taped to my cell phone.
April 15, 2009: Today, I broke my record for the number of notary assignments in one sitting with 200 notarizations on a movie set in downtown New York for the upcoming movie The Sorcerer's Apprentice. When I accepted the job, I didn't consider how embossing 200 documents with my notary seal would start to get pretty painful after the first 100. But, getting to watch the Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage doing his scenes 3 feet away helped ease the pain.
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