Moving

No! This is not about my moving. I am adding yet another real estate agent to the list of those who have craved to sell ol' White Rock—for a commission, of course. I had to look for a new agent, because the most recent one fell by the wayside. All previous ones in the past twenty years or so have done that. The White Rock is an agent killer!

This new deal is going to be electronic. No tedious meeting in stuffy offices with reams of papers being solemnly passed from hand to hand, each one receiving the participants' initials under the eagle eye of the lawyer and his assistant.

I simply got an email with a pen as a signing symbol and the advice to click on that symbol in order to sign the listing contract. But no contract! Sign a blank sheet! I, the signer, turn all my personal property over to the person from whom this invitation-to-sign originated. So simple have things become! How could I miss those many decades of slow evolution from legal suffocating protraction to a handshake with a computer? I do, of course, remember that sometime in our very remote past a handshake was the seal to an unbreakable contract. You try to slip away, one of the six slugs of the Colt will get you, sooner or later.

The suggestion that this has to do with moving comes from the following apparent line of thought: you deal with a real estate agent, of course you want to sell your house. If you sell your house, logically you must move to another house. Here is the deal: Without having asked for any of it, you are now swamped with offers from every listed business even remotely connected with the selling or buying of real estate property, and each of them says, 'If you sign up with me for my services, you get a discount of 10%, or 15%, or even 25% or more.' If you are diligent in contrast surveying and combining all these discounts, you might sign up for an overall deal that returns money to you! It'll take a lot of effort and zillions of papers to sign. So don't get your hopes up too fast nor too high.

Want a country store that has been in business since 1945? Here's the deal, and here's the handshake.