The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Every day I get a call, sometimes 3, from some nice stranger who wants to know if I’d be willing to sell them my house.  My house, it seems, is very very popular.  I wish I was that popular but I’m the owner of said house and maybe that should be enough for me.  Course, none of these would-be buyers have ever seen my house, at least not the inside.  I suspect they can find a google shot of the street and the outside, probably know what Zillow thinks it’s worth, surely know what I paid for it or have a guess since I built it myself so the county records wouldn’t have the price I paid if we’d bought it 30 years ago on the open market.

For awhile I’d tell my nice stranger when they asked if I was interested in selling, “You bet!”  This almost always caused a long pause, no doubt my caller wasn’t used to a potential sale and certainly not one whose owner was enthusiastic.

“Well, um… did you have a … um … price in mind?” they would ask.  And I would practically shout, “I do indeed!!”  “And … um… what were you thinking, price-wise, I mean?”

Sometimes I would say two million dollars, sometimes less but a helluva lot more than they hoped some Alzheimer owner might throw out, some grandma with dementia still able to sign over the deed for double what she paid for the place 50 years ago.  Which inevitably resulted in another long pause before they recovered enough to state that we could probably come to some kind of mutual agreement.  To which I would reply that the price just went up, take it or leave it.  When they started to speak again, boom, price just went up another hundred thou.  Followed by a click.

You get tired of fooling around with these people, though, after dozens and dozens, one after the other, sometimes, I suspect, the same yahoo.  If you haven’t got anything better to do, tell them a low ball number and wait for the heart palpitations and the salivating you can hear over the phone.  Got a live one here!

Got a sucker who’s selling for a fifth what the place is worth!

Sure, fun for a few times, then you start calling them names, question their morality, engage in some back and forth curses, and then, well, you do like I do finally when they ask if you’d be interested in selling your house, just say I was hoping someone would want to buy this place, I need to move to the Home and this is practically a godsend.  Then hang up …

Whatever you do, don’t answer the next few times the phone rings.

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