There are a lot of important things happening in the world right now. As far as I know, these are currently at the top of the list.
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Mysterious screws
I spotted a new screw on the floor in the basement in an area where nobody ever goes. How the hell did it get there?
One guy suggested I check out my air ducts along the ceiling because it probably fell out of them. So now I need to worry about the HVAC system not performing well in the gentle breeze it was built for. How long until it all comes crashing down?
They probably warn you about this in the 200 pages you sign before you can buy a house. There’s really no way to know.
Very bad attempts to help
If I order a package of socks from Amazon, the delivery guy will come try to hand it to me while I’m operating a push mower with both hands. If I order a ladder and a wheelbarrow, he will leave them at the front door.
I’m worried that if I rent a movie on Prime Video, he’ll come throw a projection reel down my storm drain.
News that isn’t
One of the local newspapers did a strictly feel-good interview with a gentleman who’s opening a new self-storage facility “for folks.” The headline called the units both “clean” and “secure.” That’s probably not especially difficult before the grand opening.
Now, I don’t know this fellow, but I’m a little resistant to “let my family serve yours” as a general vibe these days. We got a version of that line when looking for a lawn crew recently, and as soon as I said signing a 12-month agreement didn’t seem right for my family, their family stopped answering my e-mails. I suppose good contracts make good neighbors.
It just seems to me that self storage tends to benefit from the hardship of its customers and looks a little more like the landlord-tenant relationship than Ma and Pa tending to the salt of the earth. “Folks” are downsizing, losing houses, and moving in with roommates, and real estate influencer side hustle bros are telling their podcast listeners not to miss out on it.
That’s not exactly a guess. The original builder of our first home also built one of the area’s better-known self-storage spots. Well, you know how great all those public directory websites are. Some data aggregation service scraped some other stupid thing and determined I owned the facility because I had the same address as the guy who actually owned it, just much later. That’s when personal assistants started calling, emailing, and texting to ask if I would be receptive to a buyout offer from their very motivated buyer. Guess who those titans of industry got mad at when I had to tell them they bought garbage data.
None of that hits the paper, though.
We do have a few superstar journalists in the area — we just have a lot more of what I suspect would be very good greeting card writers. As the old saying goes: News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; everything else is advertising.