|
|
|
clumpiness of potential buyers
Sunday, October 6 2002
During yesterday's open house, we'd been content to have Sally the Dog with us throughout. But today we thought there'd be a bigger turnout, so I dropped her off to stay with Uncle Ray and Aunt Nancy for the required three hours.
The open house today went even better than the one we'd had yesterday, though the traffic was hardly any heavier. The difference was the seriousness of the potential buyers. For awhile there we had two different couples who were obviously into the place, one taking pictures while the other asked if the light fixtures came with the apartment (they do).
And indication of the clumpiness of potential buyers was the fact that only one came during the entire last hour of the open house. However, during this period we also got a phone call from someone who had walked through earlier and she was already wondering how much we'd be willing to negotiate.
That was pretty good news, and it sustained us throughout the rest of the day. A booster shot of giddiness came when someone called and actually made a bona fide offer.
Meanwhile, the classified ads published in the New York Times were just fucked up enough for us to complain about them (and get partial refunds) but just informative enough for us to have successfully gotten foot traffic to our open house.
Later in the day Gretchen's friend Gilley showed up and we all went down to La Taqueria for that sort of food. We went there during something of a Sunday evening rush and found ourselves crammed Tijuana-style at a table with a group of incompletely-developed anonymous teenage girls. I've been using the term "Tijuana-style" to refer to anything that is so Third World that it makes conventional Americans squirm with discomfort. Being forced to sit at a restaurant table with anonymous strangers is a perfect example of this, though it is actually rather common in a city as crowded and multi-ethnic as New York. This particular indignity, I'm told, is characteristic of lunchtime in Chinatown.
In other news, I've been a little nostalgic for my computational roots lately. So, for want of the real objects in yellowed plastic housings, I've been playing around with various emulators. When I want a minute or so of that 1984 vibe, I fire up Frodo, the C-64 emulator that requires a software throttle in order to avoid being powered by a freakish 100+ MHz 6510 (you should see what that does to the spacebar auto-repeat). For a blast from my less hardware-centered computational past, I launch the Basilisk Macintosh emulator. Truth be known, this emulation is the fastest, most well-behaved Macintosh I've ever used. According to the Speedometer benchmark, it runs ten times as fast as a Quadra 900 (the top of the line Mac in 1991). Inside this emulator, I use the amazing iCab web browser to enjoy the sort of snappy non-crashing web experiences that have traditionally been impossible on a Macintosh.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?021006 feedback
previous | next |
