A few days ago, I was starting to get a wee bit nervous about not seeing the EMAIL from the NC Secretary of State directing me to make another trip downtown to the Register of Deeds office to re-take the two oaths to be commissioned to do electronic notarial acts.
After all, I had actually attended the class and passed the examination above the required grade of 80%.
Though yes, I was more than a bit irritated at missing that one question after misreading the question and for some reason was thinking it was referring to Title 18 of the Code of Federal Regulations rather than Title 18 of the NC Administrative Code but it’s Nick and Katie’s consensus that I’m just too much of a obsessive perfectionist and just need to bloody get over it!
Not long after the class had adjourned and well before I’d expected it, I got the EMAIL indicating that my record had been updated and directing me to an electronic form which I duly filled out right about midnight and then paid the application fee electronically which returned me to this screen:
And this is where things kind of went off the rails.
These past couple of weeks, I’ve been checking the inbound EMAIL logs to see if the expected notification had landed on the server but had gotten binned by the very aggressive spam filter settings I use for my EMAIL accounts. Even if SpamAssassin deletes the EMAIL straightaway, the logs in the server’s control panel still show it arriving but there was nothing that had arrived from the Secretary of State’s domain.
OK, so far so good but I figured I’d go ahead and whitelist them in SpamAssassin to be sure.
Another week passes and I’m still not seeing anything from them and now I’m getting a bit nervous because I really would rather not take the class that I paid for and passed and have to pay the application fee again.
This morning, I rang up our friends in the Notary Public Section to see if there was anything I really needed to know.
After giving my details so she could find me, she identified the problem straightaway.
Apparently they were still waiting for the application to arrive in the mail but I didn’t have the application, only a PDF of the receipt that I’d paid the fees electronically after filling out the online application form which I had figured was *THE* application form.
Now I’m really wondering how screwed I am and thinking there goes another $52. 🙁
On a whim, I went back to the EMAIL that gave me the URL and tried it again and got the same screen you see above only this time the brain actually *COMPREHENDED* the underlined bit right after the green “Go to Next Step”.
Ah. There’s the form that needs to be printed, stamped with the seal, notarised by someone other than me (darn!) and then put in the post to the Secretary of State’s office.
I’ll give the nice lady on the other end of the phone mad props for not taking shameless advantage of the ensuing confession that I’d completely biffed the reading and comprehending of those instructions but now I had the form in hand and I’d tend to getting it done up properly and posted to them straightaway.
I’m sure this wasn’t the first time she was dealing with an over-eager beaver whose fingers were faster than their brain’s synapses and had unintentionally fallen prey to self-induced idiocy. 🙂
But yeah…the ID-10-T error code was flashing quite clearly that morning!
Oops!
Fortunately, there’s really no harm done except to my own ego.
Even if I’d gotten the form to them properly a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t anticipating doing any electronic notarial acts before the new process comes into play on 1 Jul 2023 with the retirement of the emergency video notarisation process used during the COVID-19 restrictions.
Somehow, I think with the posting of the perfected application form that I’ll have a much better chance of getting that EMAIL telling me to wander downtown to Salisbury St and do the deed at the Register of Deeds office. 🙂
