As realtors, we never quite know what kind of situation we’re going to find ourselves in until it’s too late. A few years ago, I was called to estimate the value of the home of a couple who were divorcing. Stepping onto the porch, I discovered that someone had nailed a doll to the door, and made it more graphic, not only by sticking a nail through its neck but by streaking the body of the doll, as well as the front of the door, with red paint. People never fail to surprise me.
Pat, a real estate agent who had worked with me in the Allentown, Pennsylvania office of our firm, regularly joked that we really needed to stop advertising in Psycho Buyers Today. After working with the public for more than two decades, I’ve come to realize that there are lots of people in this world that, despite their apparent ability to function in their everyday life seem, in reality, downright crazy. Of course, making such a statement will probably net me hundreds of letters from mental health care advocates and professionals who feel I am insensitive, but I’ve always preferred to be blunt (and lighten up – it’s a joke).
I first realized the pervasiveness of the sort of insanity to which I’m referring more than twenty years ago when, together with some friends of mine, I took fifty or sixty teenagers camping. Actually, looking back, it was insanity for my group to think we could actually handle fifty or sixty teenagers in the woods. However, we had gone on this outing several times before. On this particular occasion, we brought along a young man named Roger.
On the first evening of the campout, we traditionally built a large fire, and sat around it, roasting marshmallows and telling stories about former campers whose bodies, for a variety of reasons, had never been fished out of the nearby lake and whose ghosts continued to haunt the grounds nightly, showing a special interest in teenagers. These tales were, as we expected, greeted by our friends and charges with shrieks and shudders.
On the second and final evening, our plan was to light an equally large bonfire, and since the ash and a small amount of remaining wood was still smoldering in the middle of our fire pit, I proceeded to build a large pyre over top of the ashes by standing large logs against each other. Although we didn’t intend to officially light the fire until later that night, I didn’t believe the logs would catch from the remaining embers.
Roger, however, with trickery in mind, having filled a plastic cup with kerosene or propane, sneaked up behind me while I was bent over the pit and dumped the flammable liquid on the embers, causing an upsurge of flames that rapidly removed most of my eyebrows.
Friends of mine, Tom LaDue and Todd Siegfried, hung Roger upside down from a tree for several hours after that. In the current environment, this would probably have resulted in their being arrested or, at the very least, sued. But at the time, they felt this was an appropriate response to Roger’s attempt to flame broil me, and I agree. Punishments need to fit the crimes.
Subconsciously, I believe far too many of us really want to hurt ourselves or see someone else hurt. Others seem to have a sense of invulnerability. For example, the husband of an employee at our title company recently decided to dramatically show what crazy really means.
Her husband decided to trim a tree out front with a chainsaw. Unfortunately, the ladder didn’t quite reach high enough to get at the offending limbs. In a moment of sheer brilliance, he drove his van up to the tree and put on the emergency brake and, when that didn’t work either, actually set up a ladder on the roof of the vehicle, on a hill, from which vantage point, he proceeded to operate the chainsaw. Thankfully he didn’t dismember himself, but I don’t think it was for a lack of trying.
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