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No, seriously, I am. Honest. Just ask anybody. For instance, ask Peter Glover.
Who's Peter Glover ? Good question. Nobody, really. Some Canadian dude in his 30's, working as a real estate agent in Guatemala. Ain't he on top of the world ? Do you even know what they make, salesmen in Guatemala ? It's like 5k a year. Even 6k in a good year. Except not dollars. They don't use dollars in Guatemala, they have their own play pretend currency, the quetzal. A quetzal is worth about ten cents, or about one pretzel, so our friend Peter makes the hourly minimal wage. Every couple of days. But wait. That's nothing, don't judge a job on the pay alone. As a guatemalteco real estate salesman, Pete gets all sorts of perks. For instance, he gets a toilet paper roll each month. Plus, one bucket of water every week. Just like Attica. Well, before 71, but what do you want. Guatemala is a tad behind the times. 35 to 50 years or so. Ever read my adventures in their play pretend airport ? Well, before getting out of that shithole, I did try to find a place to rent. They have a few real estate agents, except they're not what you'd expect to find if you visited a real estate agent. Moreover, like the money, and the airport, and everything else in Guatemala, they're play pretend real estate agents. (to be perfectly fair, we did stay in a hotel that was top shape, BUT the girl had found that using her secret magic, even before we set foot in the country. it remained, throughout the few days we spent there, pretty much the only non play-pretend object, place or thing we ever encountered) Now, Peter works for one of these play pretend agents (He really works for his girlfriend, who owns the agency, but we'll let that slide). From our brief encounter, we learned a lot. We learned that there are no places with Internet going under one thousand. Dollars, this time. At this point, I'm slightly taken aback by a little voice in my head. How is it possible that some schmuck in Salvation Army clothes making a few hundred a year sits across from me and quotes thousands of dollars ? What is going on here ? Upon sumary observation of the town, it became apparent what's going on. Some reasonably well off prickly Californian cunts decided they absolutely and positively must help the poor spics this season. So they got a couple mill off the hedge fund hubby manages, packed their priceless artwork and lapdogs and landed in Guatemala. Quite probably, they visited quite a few other countries, but they stopped here because.... well, because they couldn't figure out how to get to their flight so they couldn't ever leave. The airport there is a mess, getting to your flight is akin to finding the Grail, Monty Python rendition. You have to find a shrubbery first, and cross the Bridge of Death and all that. While their few millions lasted, they pumped up the market. Every crone for miles put her cow dung shack (this is not hyperbolae. i mean it literally. cow.dung.shack) up for rent, starting at 500$ per square foot. plus 100 per window. 150 if it has glass in it. (130 if broken). So, play pretend real estate agents have been riding that wave, bilking a handful of women that have no idea what money's worth. Except, not only did it run out, but the husband's hedge funds aren't doing too well of late, and to add to the mess, housing prices in the us got the chute. So... the wave is over. But back to our petes. We received, with gaping mouths, an excellent offer. We could, for 600 or so, get a lovely ROOM, with access to a bathroom, in the house of some very nice people, that emmigrated 30 years ago. Of course, there'd be no partying. What's that mean ? Well, they're very religious folks, so, no alcohol and no visitors. You know, parties. In other words, for more money than proper housing costs anywhere in the civilised world, we could rent a closet in the house of someone's retired parents. In a sort of rural Florida that's been through 20 wars and 50 bombardments in the past 25 years. I don't see how that offer's worth money. So I quietly filed Peter away under "Harmless, raving lunatics" and went on my way. Except, he's been sending me mail ever since. Here's his most recent production : The following house has drastically reduced its price to $135,000 FINAL from the original asking price of $160,000. Click on the following link to view the listing on our website [...] to see further details of this house. La siguiente propiedad ha bajado drásticamente su precio final hasta $ 135,000 de la cantidad pedida originalmente ($ 160,000). Haz clic en el siguiente link [...] para ver el listado en nuestra base de datos con los demás detalles de esta. Regards, Peter Glover 5a Avenida Sur #6 (beside Monoloco) Antigua, Guatemala Central America (502) 7832-9530 MESSENGER mailto:bamboogroup@hotmail.com mailto:bamboogroup@hotmail.com bamboogroup@hotmail.com SKYPE ME @ bamboo.group Now, there'd be not much wrong with it, I get plenty of idiotic spam already. Even the fact that he included no less than 9 (nine) pictures of the turd could be put under "still learning the internets". But quite frankly, I find the discount offensive. If you try to sell a pencil for a thousand dollars, I'm just going to laugh. But if you say crap like, "unique oportunity, this pencil, just nine hundred, used to be a thousand, drastical reduction" you stand a chance of pissing me off. So, I sent him a little note. 1. no house in antigua, guatemala is worth 10,000 dollars, not to mention over 100,000. houses in the hamptons and palo alto go for that sort of money. bumfuck, central america is not the hamptons. bumfuck, central america is not palo alto either. and it's not a lot of other things. in fact, im not sure there exists anything in all guatemala worth 100k. 2. with that in mind, kindly stop emailing. Now, in the grand scheme of things, Pete isn't exactly a top dog. If we wrote down the hierarchy of this world, top to bottom, we'd probably run out of paper before we'd hit his spot. But, fortunately for him, this hasn't dulled his spirit. And apparently, one of the many perks his unique situation presents him, is calling things as he sees it. To the customers. Here is his reply : Dear kind sir. You are not worth my time. You have been eliminated from our dist list... now kindly go fuck yourself asshole. Regards, Peter Glover 5a Avenida Sur #6 (beside Monoloco) Antigua, Guatemala Central America (502) 7832-9530 www.bamboogroupsa.com peter@bamboogroupsa.com MESSENGER bamboogroup@hotmail.com SKYPE ME @ bamboo.group The funniest thing about that is, you may notice an extra blank in the signature line ? You know, most mail clients will allow you to add automatically some text to every message. But... they always add the same block of text, don't they ? How come there's an extra line this time ? Could it be Pete hasn't figured the automatic part and is typing all the many ways to connect to him by hand every time ? But then, WHY do it on this last offering ? Is this some sort of guatemalan hard to get ? Anyway, since my site has quite a bit more page rank than theirs, I will be a nice fellow and give them a free link : Real Estate Company that tells customers to go fuck yourself, asshole. Be sure to visit. 13 people look forward to doing business with Peter Bamboo. |