Since we've been sorta house hunting, we also have been getting lots of advice from people who want to help us poor, hapless "first-time-home-buyers". My husband just had to tell me something so important that he got from "this dude" at work.
"If you don't know what you are doing, you are at the mercy of anyone with a truck and a business card. And problems come up that you have never even heard of."
Okay....I'm listening.
They had this snake in the back yard. Not a big snake but big enough to make the dude pass out. So he calls this guy, the snake guy. Snake Man. That was his name. "Snakes in the Yard? Call Snake Man." He had a truck with a little picture of a snake and everything. The dude says to the Snake Man, "We have a snake."
He says, "Where?"
Once again, Dude says, "Finding it will be pretty much up to you. I'm just telling you we have one."
Snake Man looks around and then tells Dude, "Listen, the kind of snake you have here is fine. It's a good kind of snake to have, because they scare away the mice. You want these kind of snakes."
Dude says, "Okey-dokey." And he pays him. For doing nothing. He gave the man forty-five bucks for allowing him to continue to have the snake he already had.
So now he rests comfortably in the knowledge that he has no mice, because they are all scared of the snake.
But this makes me think. He's scared of the snake, too. That's why he called the Snake Man in the first place. Evidently, the only way he's going to get rid of the snake, is to scare him with something bigger. A mongoose. A cheetah. But then he'll have to scare them away, and it will never end. The animals will just get bigger and bigger. He could end up with a hippo in the living room.
"Don't worry, Honey--they scare away the bison. Did you notice there were no bison around? Why do you think that is? They're scared. Nice, huh? Hippo Man was here today, he explained the whole thing; forty-five bucks we're bison free for a year."
Sheesh.
