My wife and I dipped our collective family jewels – figuratively speaking – in the running river that is the housing market again this week. We figured with all this talk of a recession it might be a good time to buy. Fuck were we wrong.
NZ might now officially be in a recession but I don’t think anyone has told homeowners trying to flog off their properties at the same over inflated price they bought it for. This was always going to happen of course. Prices got so crazy a few years ago that we all knew as soon as the arse dropped out of the housing market that there would be tears before bedtime. One house we made an offer on has been on the market for months. The vendor declined our offer – which was very reasonable given the current climate - because he’s holding out for 40k more. Good luck with that mate, hope you’re happy to wait a few months more.
One thing that hasn’t changed is absolute amateur behaviour of the people posing as real estate agents. Once upon a time, people like my mother, the stay at home mums of my generation, ended up selling Tupperware and Avon as a means to an end. These days the very same type of people sell houses - the product might have changed but the ‘gagging for your dollar’ way of going about it hasn’t. The tendering process of buying a house is supposed to be a confidential one, where only the real estate agent and the vendor gets to see all the offers on the table. Well our stay at home mum pretty much told us what our competitors were offering as a means to get us to offer more, which of course would be in her best interest too because she gets a bigger cut of the wedge.
It’s like when you go to a recruitment agency and the consultant makes like you’re her new best friend and talks you up as being perfect for a vacancy she has. It’s easy to get sucked in by the show of false sentiment and think that she’s on your side and that any day now the two of you will be sharing long, warm showers together. It’s a great feeling but guess what? She isn’t. A fact that dawns on you a few days into the job from hell that sat open on the same consultant’s books for months. To her you’re just a four figure payout and a set of test results.
I remember going to this new agency this one time and after going through all the standard typing, Word and Excel tests had to sit through another two hours worth of psychometric testing. After about half an hour I’d had enough and simply ticked ‘A’ on every multi choice question from that point on. My consultant was somewhat confused when reviewing my ‘interesting’ results until I pointed out – rather smugly I might add – that I had merely answered ‘A’ 327 times in a row. She made some disparaging comment about how my results couldn’t possibly accurately reflect my potential to a prospective employer given that I had chosen the first option on every question. To which I replied something along the lines of ‘well if the job was as boring and as useless as your testing I wouldn’t want to work there anyway’.
I never did hear back from that agency now I come to think of it.
It didn’t take China long to get back onto everyone’s shit list did it? Just when they had hoped we’d forgotten about all the civil rights violations, the whole Tibet thing, Engrish and badly made McDonalds Happy Meal toys that only last two or three goes, comes the whole milk powder scandal. Turns out the guys who make the most milk powder in China knew about the problem but did not disclose it publicly for at least a month throughout August, whilst Beijing hosted the Olympics. Fair enough, no one likes a kill joy after all but this was hardly a ‘we’ve run out of paper plates’ or ‘someone’s double dipped the tomato sauce’ type of party faux pas. No this was more a ‘someone’s pissed in the punch’ type of cock-up.
Still, it could be worse. Like the couple having a quickie on the train tracks who got run over by a freight train in South Africa last week. Apparently its quite a frequent event in the part of town that it happened – for people to rut on the tracks – because the working girls often take their clients their for a romantic root amongst the passing 3000 tons of metal. Gets me moist just thinking about it actually. The funny thing was that the driver saw the two and sounded his horn several times but yet they didn’t move? Now that’s what I call getting your moneys worth. Put’s a whole new spin on the term ‘horny’ doesn’t it?
Apparently the condom the guy was wearing was found still on his chopper, despite the fact that he was found in pieces. Now there’s an advertising slogan in that somewhere….
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