Prehensile Thumb

The Man With The Prehensile Thumb

It is one of the coldest days of winter, around zero Fahrenheit, but my clients — a young couple — are looking intently for the right home to purchase.

We arrive a few minutes early at the next home on our viewing schedule. I park. The listing agent’s car is not there yet. As we sit in my car waiting, a man emerges from the front door, comes over and invites us to wait inside. I decline with the explanation that I have to wait for the listing agent before I can go inside.

He shrugs, and goes back into the house.

Meanwhile, the appointed time comes and the listing agent has not yet arrived. A minute becomes 2 minutes, then 3…. After we were still waiting for about 15 minutes, the fellow comes back out, this time carrying an ice chopping tool, and — acting as though he is ignoring us — in a somewhat ostentatious manner he starts chipping away at the ice which Is covering the parking area.

As though moving at random, he gets closer and closer to my car and ends up knocking at the window, which I roll down.“It’s up to you,” he says, “but it’s warmer inside and you are welcome to sit by the wood stove and wait there.”

Seeing my clients’ eyes begging me to stop torturing them, I say: “Thank you. We can go inside, but we cannot talk about real estate.”

It turns out that this man is a tenant, not the owner. He plies us with hot cocoa, and entertains us with a steady stream humor, the funniest bit being his rendition of his cat’s inner thoughts:

*“OK, so you’re a superior being. . . fine, you have a prehensile thumb. Why don’t you use your prehensile thumb for something useful: Get a can opener, and open a can of cat food!”

This guy should be a standup comedian. His timing and delivery are perfect, and by the time he gets to the prehensile thumb bit, I am laughing uncontrollably. Then. . . in mid-guffaw. . . I look up, and through the glass doorway leading from the small vestibule to the room where we are sitting, I see The Ice-Princess, glaring at me!

She opens the door, and says: “Steee-fen, come here, I want to talk to you!”

We go into the vestibule, and with the door shut, she says: “You know better than to talk to my client!” (Of course the tenant is not her client, the seller is. In fact it as a courtesy and best practice that I avoided real estate with him, but legally and ethically we could have discussed anything.)

“Do you want to know what I said to him before we came in?” I say.

“NO, I DO NOT!” she replies, coldly.

As soon as we go inside, the tenant says to her:

“Kristal, it is my fault. They were waiting outside for you, freezing and he would not come in until you got here. Finally, he agreed, but said: ‘We cannot talk about real estate. “I am really sorry, Kristal. I apologize. Next time I’ll get my shotgun, drive him into a snowbank and shoot him!”

This fellow then shadowed us throughout the showing, totally disrupting the Ice Princess’ presentation: first, by putting his foot on a slate tile, pressing up and down, while water under the loose tile made a swishing sound. Then, he held a stairway handrail, moving it back and forth, demonstrating that it it was loose.

He just kept it up, silently exposing one deficiency after another, with am impish grin on his face.

As we drove to our next appointment, one of my clients said:

“She was unprofessional. If she had something to complain to you about, she should have kept quiet, and called you tonight, privately.

It was at that next appointment that they found their future home: A well-designed, well-built, well-insulated, charming home located in a private spot overlooking an expansive, hill-side pasture where cows grazed. Country living, yet an easy, 10 minute drive to Downtown Brattleboro.

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