For those of you who didn’t call or write (basically everybody)… yes, I became a licensed real estate broker today. It became official when the Colorado Real Estate Commission posted my license number on their web site.
True, I didn’t announce it to anyone. I didn’t post anything on Facebook or invite people to comment on my “status.” I didn’t start blogging on Acid Rain. I didn’t notify anyone in any way, really until right now.
So how could I expect congratulations.
A few things did break differently for me, however, or seemed to. Driving to Home Depot this morning, a dumb-looking dude in a dirty pickup cut me off. Then a lawyer in a Volvo cut me off. Then a kindly, grey schoolteacher in a Buick, on her way to do some charity work at a non-profit, gave me the finger.
At the store, an orange-aproned customer servant asked, “May I help you?”
Yes, I said, before realizing he wasn’t talking to me. I stood by while he staged a lawn-watering clinic for a guy who’d asked where the hoses were. I was about to speak up when a blonde lady in a short skirt squeezed between us and solicited help in the construction field.
“A two-by-four? Come on, I’ll show you,” said Apron Man. They hustled off together.
I solved my own plumbing problem by poring through a tech manual strung to the shelves, and headed to the checkout counter.
“Cash or credit,” said the cashier.
“Cash.”
“We don’t take cash,” she said.
“Then why did you ask?” I asked. She shrugged.
“Credit,” I said.
“We don’t take credit.”
“Wait a minute!” I started flailing around in protest—then realized I was agitating about in bed, amid blankets. It was all a bad dream.
But the orange-clad cashier said one last thing before I was fully awake. “That’ll be one-hundred-eighty-two thousand, three-hundred, four dollars a sixty-seven cents,” she said. She handed me a receipt for $182,304.67.
“What’s 2.8 percent of that?” asked an anonymous voice.
I didn’t hesitate, and spoke the number as I sat up in bed: “Five-thousand, one-hundred, four dollars and fifty-three cents.”
I awoke not only a licensed broker. I am a commission calculation savant.