Impossible markets; Schroederisms; Western advice
Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.
MONTANA
Sean Hawksford’s story on NPR’s Planet Money should have been happy: He’d moved to Bozeman, Montana, married a local woman, and now they were getting ready to have their first child. Unfortunately, buying a home was proving insanely difficult; competitors were offering at least $500,000 in cash for every house that came on the market. Hawksford made 18 unsuccessful offers. Feeling desperate, he found a big piece of cardboard and made a sign that he held up on a busy street, even as the temperature plunged to a frigid 15 degrees. “Please sell me a home,” said his sign. “Local business owner, wife pregnant, paid rent here 10 years.” After three long, cold days, he got some leads, and at last, a resident who saw his sign “offered to sell him a house (because) they really wanted a local family to buy it.” Hawksford’s house hunt in an impossible market may have ended successfully, but sadly, that rarely happens in the West during these “Zoom boom” days.
ARIZONA
One morning in Maricopa, Arizona, Francesca Wikoff looked out her window and realized that all four tires on the family’s truck had been slashed. Even worse, there was a human finger lying on the driveway and a bloody trail leading straight to a nearby house. The night before, the man who lived there had gotten into an argument with her husband at a neighbor’s house. Wikoff told 3TV/CBS 5 that she laughed all day to keep from crying about the incident: “You would think if you’re gonna go to the hospital — especially if you just severed your finger off — you would take said finger with you.” Her deduction that the guy made an oops! during his tire-slashing turned out to be correct. Police charged him with criminal damage.
Read more western mayhem at: https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.6/humor-impossible-markets-schroederisms-western-advice
