... is one that isn't a joke at all, or the very least an unintentional "misunderstanding."

I haven't wanted to say anything for fear of jinxing the whole deal, but Philip and I found a house in a small, very picturesque village vaguely near Leeds. To be more specific its an end-of-terrace - not perfect, but very nice. I figure given whats happened today, the chance of jinxing it is more or less a silly idea at this point anyway. We had our offer accepted and we're in the middle of getting a mortgage. We'd gotten a couple of nice shiny pieces of paper from various places stating how much we could get a house for, even taking into account our current credit card debts. So it seemed to all be going well, except that it takes quite a long time for these things to come through.

And then our independant mortgage advisor called. Philip is out of town today, so I told the gentleman he could catch him on the cellphone. A few minutes later Philip calls me telling me that the advisor said our mortgage application had been denied because of our credit card bills. Despite the fact that cost of the house is significantly less then what we'd been told we could afford. Not much to do but start crying and losing hair. I tried to remain rational about it. There are lots of mortgage companies and they're all desperate for business. The only question for me was whether or not we would end up missing out on the house we found.

A half-hour later, Philip gives me another call. Apparently the mortgage advisor checked into it, since I imagine he was as confused as we were about why the company denied it, only to find out they had been using the wrong set of figures. And that they need us to provide them another particular piece of paper that is floating around our current place somewhere. Um, yeah. Hopefully we'll actually be able to find said piece of paper.

So I hope this whole incident is my April Fool's joke of the day. Not that it was very funny and not that it didn't probably make me lose a year or two off my life. I can't imagine how Philip felt as I'm usually much better at coping with these sort of things. Who invented this day anyways?