And yet I still love this career…..

A snapshot in the life of a real estate agent….

I woke up yesterday sneezing and sniffling, and by afternoon my cold had firmly settled in.  The temperatures were dropping and wind was picking up as I left for my afternoon of showings.  It was somewhere around 15 degrees when I left my office, and by the time we reached our second showing, the temperature was around 11.  I was as bundled up as possible, but I needed my hands to work combo locks so the uncovered parts of my body were frozen and my feet just never warmed up.  

Such was the state of my physical being when we got out of the house to check out our second house. The house looked quite nice from the outside with some huge gorgeous windows in front. We could imagine the inside being nice and bright and toasty.  However, the driveway and path were covered with about two or so feet of snow and ice.  We trudged along in some old footprints until we got to the back door where I numbly opened the combo box, after about three tries. Evidently, the numbers were loose and they kept slipping from where I put them.  But eventually we got the door open, and stepped inside the garage area.  Sadly, there was no heat and the garage was a disaster. Boxes and garbage bags and equipment were all haphazardly thrown all throughout the room.  We hoped this was just an aberration and the rest of the house would be fine.

So we traversed around the junk until we got into the other half of the garage which was separated by a wall from the first part. It, too, was a disaster and by this time, we noticed some awful smells coming from the next room.  We tentatively wove our way into one of the large downstairs room.  We found a pile of feces on the rug. Whether it was human or animal, we don’t know, but that was only part of the problem.  There was a large quilt, apparently covered with urine. The carpet, what could be seenn of it, was covered with strange stains. There was garbage strewn about. There was a weird looking dark blobby mess in a laundry basket in the bathroom that sort of looked like The Blob (for those of you who have seen that movie).  The odor was all around, so it was impossible to tell where it was coming from. There was ice on the inside of an entire wall, and water bubbles were evident in the sheet rock all over the room.  We looked at each other, and left the house.  It simply wasn’t worth looking through the rest.

And off we went to the rest of our tour.  We found one possible future home for my client, but the rest of the afternoon entailed wading through more snow, walking through houses with no heat (by the way, it was colder INSIDE than outside) and investigating one house that had been obviously damaged by an angry person with a baseball bat.  Oh and did I mention my car got stuck in the snow at one house where the only place on the private road to turn around was in the snow-covered driveway? My front wheel drive car couldn’t get out, and I was out in the now 10 degree weather, using my gloved hands to dig through the snow with the dark impending.

So I spent my sick day in frigid temperatures with my quite agreeable client looking at mostly horrible houses, but the thing that truly boggles my mind is….

I still love this career!!!