by Dave Barry
“Everything’s fine here!”
Of course these systems are not perfect. Even the most well-designed electronic device cannot be relied upon to go off without any reason one hundred percent of the time. Thus most security experts also recommend that you have a backup system consisting of ...
A Large, Stupid Dog
I realize that in the chapter on housecleaning I specifically said you should never have a dog, on the grounds that they are filthy, but my feeling, as a professional author, is that if I go through life worrying about what I may have said in previous chapters, I will never get anything done. So in this chapter, I am strongly in favor of dogs as security devices, but I stress that they must be large. You don’t want one of those repulsive little yapping “lap”-style dogs that look like fur-covered insects, because the burglar will simply stuff it down the garbage disposal. This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t do you any good, home-securitywise. What you want is a major hunk of canine muscle, the kind that is always on Full Red Alert, the kind that will race to the front door, barking violently, when it hears any sound, including its own parasites.
We are blessed with such a dog, Earnest, and she is a source of great comfort to us, for we know that as long as we have her, our home is totally protected from Zachary Liebman, age five. This is the little boy who lives next door and comes over to play with our son. Earnest absolutely hates him. When we moved in, Earnest received signals from whatever distant planet it is that dogs get their instructions from, and these signals told her that Zachary Liebman is the most dangerous creature in the galaxy, and there is nothing we can do to change her mind. Zachary has come over to our house almost daily for two years now, and still she follows him around, emitting a constant low growl to let him know that she is ready in case he suddenly pulls out a concealed machine gun. And so of course we have to follow her around, going “NO! Earnest, NO!!” although this has no effect, because in matters of home security, Earnest takes orders only from the Dog Planet. So we form a colorful and loud procession—Zachary, oblivious; Earnest, furious; and my wife or me, slowly going hoarse—parading around the house, sometimes for hours. You can’t put a price on this kind of piece of mind.
One Final Word About Home Security
None of the security methods we have discussed here will foil the truly determined burglar, the veteran professional who has already broken into hundreds of homes just like yours and has been convicted seventeen times and is currently out of jail on his own recognizance. The best you can hope for, with any security method, is that you will make your home look slightly less attractive to the burglar, so that he’ll pass you and burglarize somebody else’s house. In fact, you might leave a little note on your door, letting the burglar know that your particular house is probably less attractive to him than several other homes in your neighborhood where you know for a fact that the owners are away on vacation. Sure, this means extra work for you, but society has no chance against the Criminal Element if people like yourself aren’t willing to “get involved.”
Crimestopper Tips
If you go away for any length of time, be sure to leave a radio on in your house tuned to a station that plays “rap” music, so that if a burglar does get in, most of his brain cells will be killed instantly and he won’t be able to remember how to get back out.
Also you should ask a neighbor to come around and collect your mail and your newspapers, put out your garbage, and while he’s at it, maybe mow your lawn and paint your house and build a deck out back. Hey, it’s worth a shot.
Chapter 10. A Lawn Is A Terrible Thing To Waste
Up to this point we have been concentrating on the inside of your house, because that’s where you actually live, unless you are even dumber than we thought. But the outside of your house—the grounds and how they are landscaped—is also important, especially in terms of property values. To illustrate this point, let’s consider two homeowners, whom we’ll call “Smith” and “Jones.”
(These are not their real names. Their real names are “Smith” and
“Brown.”) Let’s say these two people bought identical homes in the same neighborhood on the same day for the same price, fifty thousand dollars.
“Smith,” a very hard worker, takes excellent care of his yard. Every weekend he’s out there mowing his lawn, pruning his shrubs, and crouching in the dirt working on his flower beds. Meanwhile
“Jones” is a lazy lout who never does anything to his property except occasionally empty his car ashtray on it on his way to the convenience store to buy more beer.
Now, let’s say that at the end of five years, both properties are placed on the market. “Jones,” who failed to maintain his yard, gets $72,500 for his property. This price, when adjusted for inflation, works out to be a profit of just 7.2 percent for our lazy homeowner. But “Smith,” the hard worker, would have received
$86,300 for his property, if he had not been attacked by fire ants one afternoon while he was weeding the pachysandra patch and stung an estimated five-hundred-thousand times before his body was found by the water softener man, who later married “Smith’s” widow, who was able to use the life insurance money to buy them a luxury condominium where the closest they ever come to yard work is sometimes they fling the ice from their gin and tonic off their balcony onto the golf course. So there should be no question in your mind about the value of properly maintaining your property.
The key area, of course, is the lawn. This is the centerpiece of the yard, and it has been for hundreds of years, ever since the invention of ...
The Very First Lawn
Like so many other good ideas, such as eating snails, the lawn was invented by a French person, Jean-Harold Discotheque, in 1732. He called his invention “Lawn” (French for “the lawn”). His prototype lawn was very primitive, consisting of only one humongous blade of grass about 30 feet in diameter and 120 feet high; so, as you can imagine, it was not ideal for such purposes as croquet, and it was hell to mow. But in the following years there were a number of spectacular technical breakthroughs—the two-blades-of-grass lawn; the six-blades-of-grass lawn; etc.—until finally we reached the modern lawn consisting of many millions of tiny blades, each one of them diseased. This is where we stand today.
The Future: Lawns In Space
Currently there are no lawns in space, although the U.S. Defense Department Office of Massive Stupid Wasteful Projects has a crash program to put one there before the Russians do. As you can imagine, this is an exceedingly difficult task, for space is a very hostile environment almost totally devoid of mulch.
Lawn Care In America
We Americans can make the proud boast that no other nation cares for its lawns as much as we do. Lawn care has made America what it is today.
As a patriotic noncommunist homeowner, you are responsible for maintaining the American tradition of lawn care and learning as much as you can about this important subject from books other than this one. You definitely won’t find anything useful here. I care for my lawn about as well as Godzilla cared for Tokyo. When I die, I will go to Lawn Hell, where homeowners like myself are forced to lie outside with no food or water and have dogs pee on them while their lawns relax inside on Barcaloungers, eating barbecue chips and watching football on TV.
Nevertheless, I have, over the years, learned a few basic facts about lawn care, the two major ones being:
If you fail to feed, fertilize, and water your lawn, it will die. If you feed, fertilize, and water your lawn, it will die.
Fortunately this is not a problem, because you can always get a new lawn, in the form of “sod.” The way sod works is, you pay a large sum of money, and sweaty men arrive at your house driving a filthy truck, on the back of which is stacked an actual living, breathing, feeling lawn, Some Assembly Required. God only knows where the sweaty men get this lawn. My theory is that they simply go and steal somebody else’s lawn, so that over the course of several decades, the same lawn could make its way, house b
y house, through an entire subdivision.
Proper Lawnmower Care
It’s important to take good care of your lawnmower, because as the old yard care saying goes: “A lawnmower that is running right is
a lawnmower that is capable of slicing through your foot like a machete through Wonder Bread.” This is why manufacturers recommend that you perform the following routine maintenance procedure on your lawnmower every two weeks or ten-thousand miles, whichever comes first.
1. Lubricate the linkage connecting the abatement disk to the invective moderator, taking care not to masticate the tropism extractor.
2. Remove the parameter valve from the heliotrope converter and examine the reversion unit for signs of fatigue or drowsiness.
3. Let’s not kid ourselves. You’re not really going to follow this maintenance procedure, right? I bet you never engage in any of the Goody-Two-Shoes consumer activities that manufacturers are always recommending. Me either. Like, whenever I buy an electronic product, the first thing I do is remove the safety information sheet that says, “URGENT EMERGENCY ALERT: BEFORE YOU ATTEMPT TO USE THIS PRODUCT, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE FOR GOD’S SAKE IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE READ THIS SAFETY INFORMATION SHEET,” and I toss that baby right into the trash compactor. I would no more perform routine maintenance procedures on my lawnmower than I would clean my barbecue grill, or inspect my air conditioner filter, or save my original appliance cartons, or wipe my telephone answering machine with a damp cloth, or any of the other 1,536,862 idiotic things that various manufacturers, in an effort to turn me into a mindless consumer geek, have recommended that I do. Because this is America. This is the land of rugged, independent, self-reliant freedom fighters like Davy Crockett, who stood tall at the Alamo and fought on bravely even though he and his small band of men were badly outnumbered by thousands of manufacturers, coming over the walls in waves, armed to the teeth with Limited Warranties. And I am proud to say that the same spirit still exists today, that people like yourself and myself deal with lawnmower maintenance the way Americans have dealt with it since the Revolutionary War, namely: We leave our lawnmowers unattended in the garage all winter, and then we drag them out, brush off the spiders and yank fruitlessly on the cord until we are about two yanks shy of cardiac arrest; then we remove the spark plug and peer into the little hole, hoping that maybe the Spark Plug Fairy will appear in there and wave her tiny wand and make everything okay, but of course she doesn’t, so we hurl the lawnmower into our car and drive down to the lawnmower repair place, where they tell us that it will be two to three months before they can even give us an estimate, because of the large backlog caused by other rugged and self-reliant homeowners like ourselves.
Shrubs
Shrubs are pathetic little mutant trees that you purchase to replace the nice big trees that were probably on your property before the developer came in and knocked them over with bulldozers. The way you plant a shrub is, you and your spouse lug it around your yard, setting it here and there and then standing back to see how it looks, until you settle on a spot directly over the largest buried boulder on your property, which is where you start digging. Shrub-lugging homeowners are so effective at locating buried objects that they are now routinely employed by archaeological expeditions. The archaeologist will get a couple from, say, Milwaukee, take them over to Egypt, hand them a juniper bush, and ask them where they think it should be planted. Then, using a helicopter, they’ll follow them as they wander around the endless, undifferentiated desert for days, plopping their shrub here and there, looking at it, shaking their heads, and moving on. When, finally, they’re satisfied that they’ve found the right spot, the archaeologist will swoop down, stick his shovel into the sand, and—CLUNK—there will be the sound of metal striking an ancient tomb that has lain undisturbed for four-thousand years. It saves a lot of time.
Gardening
Americans have never been as fond of gardening as, for example, the British, who have, through centuries of puttering, managed to transform their little island into one of the world’s fourth-rate powers. Of course you cannot hope to achieve this kind of result in your own yard, but you will definitely find that for every hour you spend tilling the soil in the early spring, you will be richly rewarded with many more hours of fertilizing the soil in the late spring and weeding the soil all summer.
There are many different types of gardens to choose from, such as the flower garden, which consists of flowers; the vegetable garden, which consists of vegetables; and the Japanese garden, which consists of Japanese. But I myself have found that the best type, in terms of ease of maintenance, is the “garden consisting of ugly plaster statuettes.” Of course the type of ugly statuette you should choose depends on the climate in your particular area.
Chapter 11. Getting Some Fool To Buy Your House
No matter how perfect your new home seems when you first move in, you’ll gradually discover various shortcomings about it that get on your nerves, and ultimately you’ll come to hate it. This usually takes about two weeks. From that point on, you’ll be thinking about Trading Up.
Trading Up is the basic maneuver in real estate, dating back several million years to the prehistoric Catalytic Era. In those days, a typical couple would have to start out living in a small cave, but each day they’d go out and hunt for pretty stones, which they’d put in a pile, called Equity, in the center of their cave. When the Equity was big enough, they’d move to a larger cave, where they’d repeat the process and move to a still larger one, and so on until they moved into their Dream Cave, which was occupied by a saber-toothed tiger, or carnivorous humongous (literally, “huge payments”), which ate them. This is essentially the system we use today.
Before you can buy a new house, of course, you need to sell the one you’re in now.
The Best Way To Sell A House
The best way to sell a house is to walk down a city street and have a construction worker who is eating a sandwich fifty-five stories above you accidentally drop his lunch box so that it lands on your head in such a way that you are not seriously injured, but you do lapse into a coma, and you wake up four months later and the nurse says: “While you were in a coma, your house was sold.” This is also the best way to move, have a baby, and attend the opera. But things are rarely this easy. Usually you have to put quite a bit of effort into selling your house, starting with asking yourself the question ...
Do You Need A Real Estate Broker?
I touched upon this subject back in an earlier chapter, but I am quite frankly too lazy to go back and read what I said. Probably
I said that there are pros and cons, because there almost always are, unless you’re talking about hemorrhoidal tissue.
On the one hand, if you sell your home yourself, you avoid paying a large commission; but on the other hand, you have to deal with people calling you up and coming around to your house all hours of the day and night, pestering you and giving you no peace. I’m not talking about potential buyers. I’m talking about real estate brokers, trying to get your listing. The only way to get them to go away is to sign a contract with them. Then you’ll never see them again.
Ha ha! Just kidding, of course. In the interest of fairness and decency and, above all, not receiving thousands of concerned letter bombs from the large and powerful real estate industry, let me state that, I am sure that virtually all brokers out there are honest and highly competent professionals of the type regularly shown on TV wearing geek-style blazers. And even if it turns out that they’re not, I strongly advise you to use a broker, for the same reason that I’d advise you to pay somebody else to repair your automobile transmission, namely: No matter how incompetent or overpaid this person is, he or she can’t possibly screw things up as badly as you would if you did it yourself.
Before you sign a listing contract, you should talk to several brokers, to find out what they think your house is worth. What you want to be on the alert for here is a practice called “high-balling,” which is when an unscrupulous brok
er deliberately overestimates the value of your house, just to get the listing:
BROKER: Mr. and Mrs. Jones, based on thoroughly walking around your living room here, I would estimate that the market value of your house is a hillion gazillion dollars.
YOU (suspiciously): Wait a minute. Our name isn’t Jones.
BROKER: Don’t worry about that. This is just a pretend dialogue in a humor book.
Once you’ve selected a broker, you’ll be asked to sign a standard contract, which will read as follows:
STANDARD REAL ESTATE LISTING AGREEMENT
1. The BROKER gets FIVE PERCENT.
2. Even if the BROKER doesn’t do SQUAT.
3. Even if the BROKER is off somewhere like MAUI, drinking EXOTIC TROPICAL DRINKS with names like KAMIKAZE KAHLUA when a WILLING BUYER, acting totally on his OWN, appears on the SELLER’S doorstep carrying a SUITCASE full of CASH MONEY, the BROKER still gets FIVE PERCENT.
4. In return, the SELLER gets to bitch about the BROKER at social occasions.
5. “My damned BROKER couldn’t sell mascara to TAMMY FAYE BAKKER,” is the kind of snide comment the SELLER is allowed to make.
6. But the BROKER still gets FIVE PERCENT.
How Much Should You Ask For Your House?
