Well, no grades yesterday. So that’s three weeks almost / 13 working days in “Grading/Encapsulation/Imaging” without getting grades back. When the submission arrived on 6/7/21 or 6/8/21 the listed turnaround was 49 working days and the coins have now been at NGC for 65 or 66 working days as of Monday. And I really don’t care if the turnaround now is 85 working days - it was 49 when mine arrived, it was 49 for over a month of the time they’ve been there, and it was only later raised to 61, and we’re past even that. But that 49 is the thing I’m scoring against.
So, I had a nice mad going on about this yesterday - bordering on a small temper tantrum - partially because yesterday had become one of those days when you’re just hating life and mad at the world and these grades coming back and having ANOTHER weekend without knowing was just the icing on the cake of grinding my gears.
We found out on Thursday night that Ben’s friend had tested positive for CoVID. He came down with symptoms late Monday, and this kid had been playing with Ben all day on Sunday and had had dinner with us Sunday night. So, neither kid could go to school or daycare yesterday. So, what was supposed to be my Friday off turned into accomplishing none of the things I’d hoped to knock out in and out of the house, 2.5 hours in urgent care trying to test a non-cooperative 5-year-old, and trying to contain the 2 year old and the 5 year old - who are on a serious mommy--obsession-kick - while Shandy tried to work and have meetings. So yesterday sucked. Hard. Yesterday was rough.
Today… today is better. Life feels kinder today. It’s a little easier to smile today. I’m still kind of salty and having a bit of a mad-after-glow on this, but life is better today.
And… we’re doing much better than they are across the street. Ben’s rapid test was negative and he’s feeling just fine 6 days after the exposure. We’re waiting on the PCR test to come back and confirm negative but at this point I’m not terribly concerned. We aren't going anywhere this weekend and we're hoping the results come back Sunday night so Ben can go to school Monday, but I'm fully expecting a negative result at this point. Across the street, the 5-year-old and the 3 year old baby sister and the father are now all sick, and so we’re dropping off coloring books, and fever reducers… and chocolate. Good chocolate. That poor mother…
On top of everything we have a tropical wave bearing down on us that may cause localized flooding and trap us all at home for a few days even if we manage to clear the test. 
Getting back to the submission a bit… I feel like this is one of the cases were the submission tracker works just well enough to be a tease while also not being terribly helpful some days. In the past I’ve seen things be finalized and shipped within about a week (4-7 working days) of hitting “Grading/Encapsulation/Imaging.” In that situation it makes sense to lump all those together and not split them out. In the case of this submission, they’ve been sitting there for 13 working days, and it just becomes a tease after having been conditioned by past experience to expect results fast after they hit that stage.
It begs the question “what’s the hold-up?” but I’m thinking it must be the grading part of that situation, because these crazy-long turnaround times are ONLY hitting World Modern and World Economy. If the backlog was in encapsulation or imaging, I would expect that to hit more across the board and hit US modern and US economy too but that is not what we’re seeing. It has had me wondering lately if there could be something wrong that they can’t talk about - like one or more of the world graders being sick.
But, if it is that, I’ll hopefully never know, because they’d never be able to discuss that with us. The only way I could see that coming to light is if some poor soul died and they made and article honoring them and absolutely no one wants that.
I keep telling myself that I just need to just stop checking this and just wait for the emails saying they’re done to hit my inbox one evening, but it’s hard. The tease is very real, I’ve been waiting for 3 months, and I just really want to finally know how they did. My worst nightmare is I’m just going to have very disappointing grades come back after all this angst and all this waiting and the whole thing is just going to come down to one massive bitter pill.
But, disappointing grade results and long waits are far from the worst things in life.
Also: Coinsandmedals - I blame you and your fancy-smancy Early Bird multi-holder crazy-complicated submission for this. This is clearly your fault - holding up my dirt-simple modern submission. You should feel bad. I hope life is treating you well and we get to hear how those did soon - hopefully he can split those off and get them shipped independently of that modern submission or nobody is going to know how those multi-holders made out until December! Lesson learned for all of us! Never shackle and Early Bird to a Modern to save a few dollars on shipping! Just pay the money!
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