06 May 2011

Misc.

Junk drawer post. I have some DS chargers, bulletin board tacks, old McDonald's Monopoly papers, and a few elastic bands in this somewhere...

Ok. First, do you want to hear a nice story about a nice family? They're nice people. They wanted to buy a house in a nice neighbourhood. They kept getting outbid by other families, so they did something different this time. THIS time, they stapled a picture of their beautiful family and a note about how much they will enjoy the house and sent it along with their offer on the place. Not only were they able to buy the place from the seller, but the seller rejected an offer of $10,000 more than this family was offering!

Nice, huh?

But maybe not all of us are nice people. I know I'm not. I'm fat and old and I don't photograph well. I have teen boys and sorry, when I'm shopping for houses and see evidence of teen boys I think loud music and dangerous driving and go somewhere else. My letter would be about yeah, we like your house because it has this one room in which I can corral my autistic child and we can get rid of the metal cage we currently use. That would go over reallly well.

Or suppose the family that bid the $10,000 more than the one that sent the picture weren't weird like me. Say they were perfectly regular people, but they were (egads) black people. Does your opinion change? Is it still ok for realtors to allow people to market themselves as buyers, knowing certain sorts of customers won't get the best deals?

I don't like this story. I know it's supposed to be a feel-good story about a nice family, but I don't feel it's a nice trend. I think if we're going to play this game we ought to at least allow listings that say "young families only" or "no Mexicans." Can we just be honest about it? I guess I will be ok with it if we are just honest about this being the pretty/ outgoing/ nice people with connections or the right ethnicity getting what they want. Nobody should be forced to sell to a given bunch of folks if they don't want to... well... and I'd like to think most people try to set that stuff aside when it's business because it's simply in their best interest to do so.

Next up: time to sign up for Pizza Hut book-it program if you homeschool! Yeah. You like free pizza.

Third... the math dance. We need choreographers to teach us that Gina has four letters. G-I-N-A. I was going to scoff at this outright but I suppose there are some children who learn kinetically and need to sort of move to get those math concepts. I don't know that graduate students and teachers need to do this for a whole day workshop or if they do, how much time they spend with real live little children. I do remember one thing we did when Emperor was tiny was get a long number line out and let him hop back and forth for addition and subtraction. When it was time to learn about adding a negative number, he did get a little bit stuck. But I think past a certain point, you can't learn 3x -2y = 75 with a dance. (If you can, please post to youtube because that really would be interesting.)

And finally, I found this little article in my browsing. I think you can certainly tell someone the chair has a 200 pound weight limit and that there's an extra charge BEFORE someone sits in it. You'd think, though, that smart business people would know there are quite a large number (ha ha) of people over 200 pounds out there. You could get a more durable chair or whatever or maybe even charge every customer a dollar more from now on. Not as a separate charge... just raise your fees to accomodate expenses such as the chair. I'm sure buffets charge a husky teen football player the same amount they charge for my three-year-old to dine and guess which one eats more...

6 comments:

  1. LOVE the baby dance link!! How stinkin' cute he was when he was tiny!

    As far as the realtors/pic thing....I'd love to be able to pre-sort my potential buyers after the drama we've been dealing with. I would write a snazzy ad and get a 1-800 number for my flocks of applicants to call. I would advertise "45 acres of Heaven with a custom built, 3 bedroom home and detached garage perched on it. All buyers should be the thuggiest of thugs, have baby mama drama, have been on Maury and if possible a criminal record. No pics necessary, just please try to have fewer teeth than a 12 month old and I will reduce the asking price for ANYONE who will do all of their own mechanic work in the front yard and leave parts cars parked year round on the lawn."

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  2. Bless you, Blondee! Aw. I think what you'd reallllly like is for a horde of rats to suddenly love the neighbour's house. Just because. And then go away quietly when they do.

    Seriously though, if they let sellers look at videos of buyers, it really is a screening process and you may as well let the sellers post "no Irish" and whatnot. More honest just to say up front what is really going on...

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  3. I completely forgot rats....yes, rats would be good! :P

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  4. Was it a nice house? You didn't mention it.

    I dunno...I feel like maybe the sellers were man-i-pu-lated. I kinda wish I could get away with that....

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  5. Looks like nice house/hood from the link. :)

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  6. I saw the photo of the "nice family" and the first thing I thought was - well I don't swim so I guess that means I don't deserve a house

    Happy Mom's Day
    I hope you get some pampering

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Non-troll comments always welcome! :)

Bringing Garbage Home

Some people up the street were throwing this table away. It was in pretty bad shape and one of the legs was off. I've glued the leg back...