Yearly Archives for 2009

Holiday Cards: 448

Trips To Various Post Offices: 4

Seinfeld Episodes I Lived In The Last Week: 2

Percentage of Cards That Will Actually Be Looked At And Appreciated, Thus Rendering This Whole Debacle Worthwhile: 5ish? Maybe?

My business partner (whose name is also Elizabeth, and we’re the same age, but she’s not short and brunette, she’s tall and blond. She’s like the bizarro-Elizabeth Newlin) and I have been mailing to a subdivision in Chandler for three years now. It doesn’t net us a ton of business, but the occasional listing and referral are generally worth the sporadic marketing energy and money we put into it. Unfortunately, this year our marketing efforts have been even more sporadic than usual for the all too common ‘economic recession issues’ and also the other Elizabeth had a baby this year, so she is no longer able to complete her duties as the more organized and  motivated force on the team, as she now has traded in her mind and sanity for a child (which I did many years ago).

So the point is, our big, consistent mailer of the year for this subdivision is our Holiday Mailer With Calendar. We also send this one out to our friends, family and past clients. Last year (because Lizzie was still gestating and totally ‘on it’) we had these cards and calendars on fridges December 6, I swear. This year went a little differently.

The cards are a multi-step process. First off, we order calendars in the fall. Then, in October or November at some point we take pictures and compose a card:

The next part of the process involves affixing business cards to the calendars, stuffing everything into envelopes, printing and affixing labels and sealing the cards. Finally, everything is taken down to the post office and bulk mailed out. So, yes, even at it’s best, the whole thing is a bit of a circus.

This year, however, every little detail turned into the disaster that ate the Christmas cards. To begin with, the date we had on the calendar to do the photo-shoots for the cards, I was actually in the middle of a four day hospital stay with my middle son and his nasty case of valley fever. So we started out about a month late on that. I ended up begging the photographer from my brother’s wedding over email to send me whatever picture she had with my entire family in it because if I had to dress my whole family up and get us to a photo-friendly location with a photographer again this year, I was going to have to throw myself into oncoming traffic. I’m a woman on the brink! I told her. Clearly, my plea was successful, even though the bride and groom haven’t received their pictures yet. Sometimes a little desperation is all it takes.

The next hurdle wasn’t due to poor timing or family illness, just general idiocy on my part. When I went to attach my business cards to the sticky portion of my calendars, I realized about 100 in to my 500 that I was going to run out of business cards by about number 200. This was December 7. So I spent the entire day reordering cards, paying huge amounts extra for faster shipping, waiving proofs and just generally begging on the phone. Unfortunately, this time desperation wasn’t enough. I was promised the cards in hand by December 11 and they didn’t actually arrive (after days of screamy, hand wringing, hair-tearing out frustration) until December 18.

So, of course, I enlisted my poor, long-suffering Realtor-assistant/husband to help me finish assembling, labeling and sealing all of the cards in one night. By 10PM Sunday night all we had left to do was seal them all. We watched Episodes 3 and 4 of True Blood (season 1) while we licked 448 envelopes. When we got to the point where there were about 30 left, I literally couldn’t lick another one without likely vomiting. Jason got it done, and I went to bed and had nightmares where I was marrying George from Seinfeld and I died from envelope-licking poisoning, but Stephen Moyer brought me back as a vampire and made me drink foul-tasting synthetic blood that tasted like envelope paste. And I woke up the next morning with my mouth glued shut.

By that point, poor Lizzie had all of her stuff totally assembled for a week and was just waiting me and my daily proclamations that “Worst case scenario, we’ll mail by Friday, I swear.”  But she has a life too, and was headed out to California to visit family for the holidays, so I was tasked with facing the dreaded bulk mail czar alone.

If you can believe it, the thing we dread most about mailing is not everything that I’d already been through, no, this is all unpleasant and time-consuming, but the worst, most stressful part about mailing is going to see the Bulk Mail Nazi (ding, ding! Seinfeld episode reference number 2!). Basically, bulk mail is insanely financially worth the hassle (25.6 cents each instead of 44 cents each, so instead of $197.12, $114.69 for my 448 cards), but it’s such a super-secret, complicated process that almost no one does it. There are all these rules (you must have at least 200 pieces going to the same general area, you must wear a yellow hat when you show up to the post office, only come between, 1pm and 1:03pm on the third Thursday of the month, the secret password is Green Eggs and Ham) and even though we’ve done it several times a year for the past three years, we never know if it’s going to work or if there’s going to be some kind of ‘NO BULK MAIL FOR YOU!!’ incident at the post office (Jeff, the bulk mail czar has told us before, ‘you know, we’re going to start charging extra fees when we have to help people because they’re not doing it exactly right,’).

So this week, I showed up at the post office we’ve been doing this at for the past three years (my company has our specific bulk mail imprint that only works at the right Gilbert post office) and got in line. Of course, because it was December 21st, the line was out the door. So I waited. and waited. When I finally got to the front of the line, and said to Jeff, “OK, I need three long bulk mail boxes,”  he said, “Oh, we don’t do bulk mail any more. It was all transferred to the Val Vista office months ago. We sent out a letter of notification.” Awesome. So I drove over to the Val Vista office (the feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach growing ever larger) and got into the back of that 40 person line. When I got to the front, I was told to drive around back with my mail and park in the bulk mail spot and wait for Mary (see, it’s like Davinci Code of mailing). Mary came out and was actually super nice and helpful (The bulk mail king is dead!! Long live the Queen!!) and got all of my paperwork together and my boxes all worked out and weighed and we were good to go. I was so relieved. It was like a Christmas Miracle. Of course I had to go back and wait in line AGAIN to pay, but whatever, I was happy: IT WAS DONE.

You know, until 6:30PM that day when I got a voicemail from Mary that our order was at least 110 pieces more than we had counted and it wasn’t going out and I needed to come back in and recount the next day. So the next day (after frantically figuring and re-figuring how our count could have been that far off and finally determining that GODDAMN IT, IT’S NOT THAT FAR OFF) I went back down. And stood outside and waited for 30 minutes for Mary before being told she was in a meeting and wouldn’t be out for at least another half an hour and that she would call me. Which she did not. I finally called and called her until I got her on the phone and she told me to come back down. I went back down AGAIN and was ushered back to a little room in the back of the giant warehouse post office and was shown my boxes of mail and told to count them. I got 3/4 of the way through (with the numbers still tracking with my original count) and opened a small box only to find it stuffed with someone elses mailers. When I took them over to Mary she said, “OH! Well that’s the problem, I must have mixed them in with yours. You’re fine! You can go! I’ll send them out.”

So… at this point here’s the big question: Was it actually worth the $82.43 I saved? Excuse me, I’ve got some traffic that needs throwing of me in front of.

Houses Seen: 11
Closets I Coveted: 2
Golf Cart Rides I Wasn’t Convinced I Would Walk Away From: 3
Farm Animals That Made My Clients Reconsider Their Decision To Purchase: 1

It’s kind of been a year of new builds for me. My husband and I, of course, build a new house out in North East Mesa almost exactly a year ago, four of my clients have actually purchased a new build property in the last year, and almost all of the buyers I worked with considered building at some point in the buying process.

The builders have had to drop prices like Oprah dropping weight on a juice fast to stay in business with all of the short sale and foreclosure prices dragging the market down the last few years. This push for competitive pricing has really made buying new attractive to a lot of people; especially those who are willing to live closer to the outskirts of town where new houses are still being constructed.

Checking out new build communities is always a fun experience, but it’s amazing how time consuming and informationally overwhelming the process can be. First you have to hear the builder speil about why their home construction saves baby seals and causes redwood forests to grow back, will give you money back on utilities instead of you having to pay for them, and grows rainbows in your master bathroom. Then there’s the tour through the model homes. If you really want to have fun, bring the builder’s agent with as you walk through, point out everything you LOVE and think is amazing about the house, ask, ‘is this standard or an upgrade?’ and watch him squirm as it becomes increasingly apparent the model was build with $100K in upgrades. And finally, you tour the spec homes that have already been constructed and are ready for purchase. This is where it all really starts to makes sense. “Oh, now I get it! The solid gold bidet in the master bath is EXTRA.” One decent new build community will time-suck an entire afternoon and you’ll often leave more confused that when you got there.

About a month ago, I spent a weekend with a couple of old friends who are moving back to Arizona after almost four years in California. We started with resale homes but eventually moved on to a Fulton Homes community in South Gilbert called Freeman Farms. Apparently Fulton is working hard at making the process of home buying out in the farmland of Gilbert a more authentic experience because this is who greeted us when we pulled up:

That little guy may not look like a big deal, but I have to tell you, he was a bit of an impediment to the process. In general, I am pro-animal. I’m not a vegetarian or anything, but I feel pretty strongly that people should be nice to other living creatures and if there’s a kitty within reach, I will happily pet him (with a couple of exceptions… there was once a cat in a house I was holding open who would not let me enter the room he was in without hissing violently. I also think he may have had acid for saliva. Additionally, my sister has a cat that is bigger than most medium-sized dogs. He freaks me out a little bit.). However, any kind of jumpy, loud animals sort of make me a bit hysterical. Barking dogs? Make me twitch and sometimes pee my pants a little. Flapping birds with sharp beaks and claws? I’m just going to climb into the trunk of my own car and hide for a little bit, ok? 

Unfortunately, my client felt this way also, only more strongly and apparently chickens can sense fear (you know, like dogs). So this chicken jumped on top of the golf cart we were riding in and flapped at our faces as we toured the spec homes. 

The builder agent kept assuring us that if ignored him, the bird would go away. Apparently he was drawn to our hysterical screams and frantic giggles.

Miles Driven: 52.5

People Actually Fooled by Exterior-Only Shots Taken By Listing Agent: 1, Oh wait, that guy was just kidding, he wasn’t fooled either: 0

How Glad I Was On A Scale of 1-10 The Sellers Weren’t Home When I Was Videoing Their House: 12

An out-of-state buyer I’ve been working with for a couple of years emailed me yesterday with a new property that had popped up on her search she wanted me to preview. She lives in Albuquerque, but has adult children here in the Phoenix area. She and her husband are looking in the Tempe/Chandler area for a house on a little bit more land with a huge garage. Because it isn’t really the normal property we see out here, we’ve just been watching and waiting for the right house to come on the market.

The house that appeared on the auto-search I have this client set up on seemed almost perfect on paper. It’s in a great South Tempe neighborhood, on a third of an acre of land, with a nice big four car garage and enough interior square footage that it should be a comfortable size for my clients. It just had one big glaring red flag flying from the rooftop: it is only listed with two photos (both front exterior shots taken from different angles).

In this digital day and age, where it takes more effort to play Wii Tennis than it does to slap eight photos up on the MLS showcasing all of the features of a house, what this says to me (and everyone with half a brain and an Internet connection) is that something is so horribly, hideously, mind-scaringly wrong with the rest of the house (infestation of giant hairy desert scorpions? quicksand in the kitchen? rare, toxic, red mold climbing the walls of the master bedroom? meth lab in the bottom of the empty swimming pool in back?) that it’s actually BETTER for the potential buyer just to imagine the potential horror that awaits than to capture it on film and release it to the general public.

So this morning I headed over to the house, with long pants and bug-squashing tennis shoes on, and my trusty video camera in hand to record all of the possible mayhem that I’m going to encounter, and of course, the house is a lot less disgusting, scary and horrible, and a lot more, messy, outdated and generally cluttered (with a bit of ‘poorly designed and constructed additions’ thrown in). My point here, to the listing agent is: DUDE. Suck it up and post some pictures. No, it’s not the most photogenic house I’ve ever seen, but you might have a chance of getting a buyer in the door who could potentially want to purchase the house, if you did.

Regardless of all of the lack-of-photos drama, I did learn an important lesson at this house today. Houses built in the 1980s tend to have tile step-ups and step-downs in weird place you (ok, I guess I should say ‘I’ here) don’t expect; which can cause incidents like the following when you (and by you, again, I mean ‘I’) are attempting to video, walk AND talk:

It’s a good thing I wasn’t attempting to chew gum also. Sigh.

Miles Driven: 90
Houses Viewed: 7
Paintings by Artists that Rhyme with Lisa Bonet I Was So Close to I Could Have Licked If I Really Wanted To: 1

I’ve been out with a set of clients who I’ve been working with for more than a year for the last few days. They own a 12,000 square foot log cabin in Wyoming that sits on 950 acres and are looking to relocate out to the Phoenix area.

Beyond the fact that their life is different and interesting enough for me to be constantly trying wrap my brain around their 950 acres (I’m always asking them questions like, ‘So, where is your mailbox?’ [Answer: 5 miles down the road] and ‘Can’t you just subdivide the land a whole bunch and sell it to developers?’ [Answer: not so much… that would require roads and utility access and sewers and zoning changes, etc.] and the Wyoming weather (‘It snows 7 to 8 MONTHS out of the year??? Wait, so like how many sweaters do you actually have?’) they are kind of just a fun couple. He has a mocking and sarcastic tone that is reminiscent of my own family (we don’t really trust ‘nice’ people. Making fun is a more genuine way to show affection as far as we’re concerned, and if any of us actually ever say anything kind to one another, well then you KNOW we really mean it and it’s probably causing us pain to do so.). She is sweet and demure until she’s occasionally vulgar in a hilarious manner. They’re down-to-earth rich folk and I feel confident that if they read this they’ll take this description as the compliment I mean it.

We have been looking in the roughly $1 to $2 million range in primarily Scottsdale and Fountain Hills, and let me tell you, we’ve scoured the price range. We’ve gotten to the point where I feel pretty confident I can tell the possibilities from the dogs without taking my clients through. We’ve worked out a system where they comb through the listings online and identify the ones that might work and I preview the houses and take a quick video of layout so that we can narrow the list further.

They came into town for the first time in several months this week. We’ve been planning for this for about 6 weeks; previewing and searching and creating a list of viable options. We narrowed the field down to 15 candidates which we have been viewing in person the last few days.

I have to say, if I could easily specialize in the luxury home buying process, I would. You know, unlike any other Realtor in the Phoenix metro area. They would all hate it, I’m sure. But whatever, I’ve got a taste of the good stuff, and I’m loving it. It’s fun to get to know your client’s wants and desires as well as your own. It’s lovely to enjoy stunning views and pick apart gourmet kitchens (“I don’t know… it doesn’t have a pot filler, my clients are really looking for a kitchen with a double ovens, a subzero, two dishwashers AND a pot filler. I don’t know if this is going to fly.”). It’s fabulous to tour winding streets up the sides of mountains and hear from listing agents about the wildlife seen (javalina, coyotes, mountain lions, tarantulas and the occasional giant hairy desert scorpion).

The problem is it’s a market hard to cultivate. Buyers in the upper price ranges are few and far between to begin with (whereas the majority of buyers will purchase in the $100K to $200K at least once in their lives) and they tend to put down roots. People who spend $1.5 million aren’t looking to move again in three years generally speaking. Also, many of the people buying in the Phoenix metro area in that price range are coming in from out of state. They are second home buyers from chilly states, or corporate drones relocated in. How do you market to a crowd that geographically diverse? It’s a lucky break to get a buyer in that price range.

Today we visited a house in Fountain Hills in one of the most exclusive communities in the city, Shadow Canyon. The house is listed for about $1.7 million and sits up on one of the highest points in Fountain Hills. It has the kind of view from every single one of the windows in the house that ruins you on every view you’ll ever see again. I spent most of the 45 minutes we were in the home transfixed in front of the closest window; practically hypnotized by the sprawling mountains, desert landscape, Four Peaks and the famous ‘fountain’ of Fountain Hills dancing before me.

The house, according to the listing agent, is owned by a 90 year old couple as a vacation home. They are selling to move into an assisted living facility. They own an island somewhere and insane amounts of art. In fact, we were told we wouldn’t be able to see the house without the listing agent present because of the crazy amounts of valuable property to be potentially stolen.

At one point, I was waiting in the hallway for my client (she takes extensive notes of all of the properties we see) and I glanced over at the painting I was standing next to only to see the unforgettable (yes, I’m a bit of an art geek; Jason and I took art history together in college and loved it) signature of Claude Monet on a waterlily-ish type oil painting. I got a little bit fan-girl for a minute and went running in to the other room to find the listing agent.

“That’s not a REAL Monet in the entry way, is it?” I asked, willing my voice not to crack with excitement.

“Well… um, yes. That’s why I have to be here with you,” she replied.

Wow. Sometimes I really love my job.

Miles Driven (Saturday and Sunday): 275
Price Range Viewed: $85,000-$1,699,000
Hours Spent in the Car: 12
Mammalian Bodily Fluids I Came Too Close For Comfort To: 2 (At Least)

I’m still immersed in a buyer crunch; showing property at all free moments. This weekend I went from Maricopa, to South Gilbert and Chandler, to North Scottsdale and finally Cave Creek (or as I fondly refer to it, South Flagstaff).

Saturday, my client and I started out in a house in Maricopa with a great layout we’d even seen before. It was a 3000+ square foot foreclosure property. Usually, with foreclosures the bank will, at the very least, send a crew in to toss all of the trash in the house, and sometimes will clean and paint the property. Not so much with this house. This house was pretty clear of debris, but it had a nice little crime scene on the floor of the kitchen:

Yes, that appears to be blood. It was splashed up on the wall in the kitchen also. We CSI-fans refer to that as ‘blood splatter’. My client actually said to me, “Do you think someone was killed here?” Nice.

The other winning house of the weekend was a cute little number over in Gilbert. We’d already tried to view this one twice, but it had tenants in the house who weren’t willing to let us in to see it unless they were there. The agent eventually had the tenants evicted and today was the first time we were actually able to get inside to view. I’m not sure I would say it was worth the wait.

I’ve never encountered such an intense odor when walking into a house before. I’ve been in lots of stinky houses, and even houses my client wanted to leave immediately because of the stench, but with this house, it was like a cat was actively peeing into my nostrils (and let me tell you, I’m not a wuss about this smell. We have three cats and occasionally they get annoyed with us and pee in the house.):

We had to cover our mouths and noses when walking through the house. I started taking pictures immediately and when I encountered quizzical looks from my client and her mother and explained, ‘for my blog,’ my client said, “It’s too bad you don’t have ‘smell-o-vision’ on your blog”. True.

But the house was worth the full trip through. Bizarrely enough, the cat pee throughout the house was not the worst feature. No, the house sits on one of those Gilbert fissures you hear about that created a crack in the foundation significant enough to cause this:

Um… wow. So, my client’s not making an offer, if you can believe that. And the crime scene house is staying on the market too.

Miles Driven: 44
Pop Tarts Eaten: 2
Egregious Instances of Mold: 5
Dead Body-shaped Objects Shoved Under a Sheet That Freaked Us Out: 1

I’m currently in pre-holiday, end of year push to buy and sell mode, so I’m out showing houses fairly non-stop. This morning, I was in South Scottsdale checking out a few houses with a young couple who have a brand new baby. We decided to head out early to get a couple of houses in before they had to be at work.

We met at the first house on Earll Drive at 8AM. The house is in an older, but geographically desirable neighborhood off of Hayden and Thomas. From the outside it was cute brick ranch with a carport that needed a bit of work. On the inside, it was the most horrifying case of mold and neglect I’ve ever seen (and this is really saying something). When I opened the door and took a step inside, I was slapped with a wave of mildew. It smelled a little bit like cardboard boxes left out in the rain and then stuck in the corner of someone’s garage (or, you know, Oregon). It was carpeted with that stuff my mother always calls ‘dead rabbit carpet’. I Googled it and it’s apparently called Sculptured Nylon (by the way, DON’T Google dead rabbit carpet. The results are disturbing, to say the least). Picture this, but 40 years old, brown and heavily stained:

The ceiling in this house was covered in popcorn texture, but it appeared to be of the DIY version, and we could tell this by three reasons:
1. It was a thicker popcorn, with heavier kernels, so to speak, than I’ve ever seen
2. In the middle of the family room there was an ornate cross on the ceiling UNDER the popcorn texture.[Dear Earll House, a 1982 Jesus Freak interior designer would like his esthetic back. Love you, Bye.]
3. In several places, large sections of the popcorn was hanging down in a big sheet, or completely missing.

In the kitchen, the popcorn ceiling wasn’t popcorned, at least, but it was black with mold and water damage. Directly off the kitchen was the master bath (which is, in itself, interesting bathroom placement that we have encountered several times in this particular Scottsdale neighborhood), minus about 30 percent of its necessary drywall. It clearly should have been minus about 30 percent more drywall to actually take care of the mold problem housed within its walls. At this point my clients were done and we bailed. It was not a successful house visit, let me tell you.

House number two of the day was cute and in decent shape. It was sorely in need of a remodel, but not a health hazard, and therefore, somewhat unremarkable for the day.

House number three, however, was a doozy. To begin with, it was occupied. The listing said that I should contact the tenant to show. I called the guy and left a message, but hadn’t heard back, so general protocol in a case like this is to attempt to show, but make sure to ring the bell and knock loudly before entering, so you don’t catch anyone doing nude yoga or sacrificing a goat or anything really weird.

The lockbox was on the front door, so I knocked loudly and opened the door while shouting, ‘HELLOOOO!’ like someone’s crazy Aunt Nancy showing up uninvited. We didn’t get a response, but there was music playing in one of the other rooms. This automatically gave the house a slightly creepy vibe. We kept thinking there was really someone there and that he would pop out at any moment.

The living room was fairly bare of furniture, except for a small end table with a black and white framed photo of Jesus (like maybe he followed us from the first house?) and a china hutch with a few knick knacks. We took a few steps into the house and the female half of my client-couple gasped loudly, clutched at her chest and practically shrieked, “This house is freaking me out! I don’t understand; why is there a photo of Jesus and then dentist’s tools?”

It turned out she wasn’t wearing her glasses and couldn’t see super well. The ‘dentist’s tools’ were really a chrome bar set, but by then, she was completely shaken. The converted carport with the giant glass cage housing a snake didn’t really help. The master bath (also with a door right off the kitchen) had a huge crack in the shower floor which had been allowing water to seep through the wall into the kitchen and deteriorating the drywall. She was the first one through the bathroom into the master bedroom, and at that point, she was almost hysterical, and backed right out of the room and declared that she wanted to leave.

When I walked into the master bedroom, I understood why she wanted to go. In the far corner of the room, there was an object on the floor under a pile of sheets and blanket that was distinctly human shaped. It was the right height for a man, with even a sort of bend up where the knee would be and looped down over the ‘feet’ at the bottom. I really wanted to tap it with a toe, just to make sure, but I’m sadly, not that brave. We hightailed it out of there. As we were locking up, the wife said to the husband, “That was the scariest house I’ve ever been in!” To which he replied, “Really? What about the first one we saw today?” And she said, “I forgot about that one!!”

Miles Driven: 122
Houses Shown: 9
Doors-to-Nowhere From Which (Presumably) Previous Owners Flung Themselves to the Hard Ground Below Only to Haunt the Property for the Rest of Eternity Viewed: 1

I showed a bucket of houses today. One of the properties was a house my client emailed over a couple of hours before we were going to meet to see another house, so I didn’t have the opportunity to print out the MLS plano. I just pulled it up on my blackberry and met him over there.

It was not the usual house I show, to say the least:

And then there’s the fact that I get a little chicken occasionally. Sometimes I’m stupidly brave. I often show houses to men I’ve never met before and regularly invite strangers into open houses when I’m alone. But when I step into a vacant house with an odd vibe alone, I start to get a bit skittish. I’m a touch paranoid about squatters (and, you know, monsters and ghosts, but that’s a given):

I’m going for the world record in number of times I can say ‘super weird’ and/or ‘super creepy’ in a video here:

Once I get that scary, creeped out feeling, it sticks with me. After wandering in this house alone for about 10 minutes, I walked out to my car and accidently hit the panic button, causing the GOV to freakout and honk and flash lights, and me to scream bloody murder like a little girl. I’m so professional, I know, you’re jealous.

A few days ago I realized that my Supra Ekey dues needed to be paid. My Ekey is a little electronic box that allows me to open lockboxes. It has to be updated daily and is kind of a vital part of my ability to do my job.

So first I went online and tried to make a payment in their online system. This failed epically. I didn’t even get past the login stage and tried both resetting my password and setting up a new account, to no avail. Enough time and frustration was involved with this event that I set the whole thing aside for a couple of days.

Today, while I was home with the boys, I realized there is a good chance if I don’t actually force my money into Supra’s hands with some method pretty soon here they are going to turn off my Ekey access. Which would make tomorrow’s 6 showings in Maricopa and one in Chandler, and the 4 clients I have set up for the weekend, just a little awkward. “Feel free to peek in the window, there, Sir. I’m going to hop the fence and see if I can jimmy the sliding glass door in the back open…”

This time, I went straight to the phone line and attempted the automated payment system there. Of course, this also failed, but not before I had to enter my 6 digit KIM key code, my 4 digit pin, my credit card number, the expiration date, and the zip code of the credit card’s billing address. Because, you know, that’s pretty easy and quick and all.

At that point I had waited too long to put it off any further, so I had to select the always thrilling door three: wait on hold for the next available service representative. And, of course, the projected wait time was When My Youngest Child Attends His Prom or Never, whichever comes later.

Instead of giving myself a grade three neck crick, I decided to put the phone on speaker and sit on the couch with my two youngest and read to them the new book we’d gotten from their grandma that day.

Now, the Supra on hold chatter was a mixture of some obnoxious guy shouting about how I could make my payment online if I wanted instead of waiting on hold (yeah, right, buddy, come over here and say that to my face!!) and about 10 seconds of excessively loud elevator music, on a loop. Plus, I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this, but my kids are LOUD.

And then there’s the fact that the book I was reading was a brief little tome about a charming fellow called Tickle Monster and his journey from another planet to torture-by-tickle the people of earth. The book also came with special furry ‘tickle gloves’. Well, and I’m an energetic reader, what can I say?

About 7 pages into this book, amid the giggling shrieks of my children, and my own animated description of one of the most sadistic story book creatures of all time, I hear, ‘HELLO???!!! MAAM? IS SOMEONE THERE??’ and realize that I’ve completely forgotten, in my zeal for holding down my youngest and blowing on his tummy, that I was waiting for an actual person to come back to the phone.

As she choked back her mirth, the Supra woman’s response to the situation was, “That was quite a passionate reading you were giving.” *Snerk*