A blonde with quiet features, Claire—a former mortgage broker—would have made for an unusual presence in the stolid environment of the bank, as she seems perfectly at home in the hip, eco-friendly salon where she cuts hair. She’s not here for the politics, however: she tells me flat out, “I’m not really a save-the-world person.” Right now, she’s just a hairstylist with an eye on a job with corporate.

What was it like, being a mortgage broker, knowing what you know now?

It was fun. You were putting people into their first homes. That’s a big deal for people.

(photo by find myself a city to live in)

This woman I know, she was talking about waiting for the call approving her loan. They kept putting it off, telling her it would be another week, and then another week. I remember that. That’s scary.

Now, they’re not approving anybody. And they shouldn’t have been back then. But it was fun.

These people had no credit. How did you expect them to avoid foreclosure? I’m glad to be out of it, but I’ve always said, if they started doing that again, approving everybody, I’d go back into it.

Yeah, people say you have three careers. I guess I got my first one out of the way. I’ll do this for a while, then I’ll move into corporate. We’ll see how that works.