If you’ve been following our family blog, you know that our house in Las Vegas has sold and closed, and we are now homeless (until mid-August, anyway, when we move into our new-to-us home in Maryland).
Our Realtor in Las Vegas was Robert Reisman – a great guy, and a fantastic Realtor. We couldn’t have been happier. If you are buying or selling in Las Vegas, you should call him. This story has nothing to do with Robert, except that he got to participate.
A couple weeks ago I was working in Washington, D.C., and Yvonne took off for the week to take the kids to Idaho to visit her family. We figured we would be home around the same time on Friday evening, but I was still in bumper-to-bumper traffic not far from the Las Vegas airport, trying to get home, when my cell phone rang. It was Yvonne, calling from the house, a little freaked out.
When she arrived home, the house was not how we left it. Ceiling fans were turned off, there was a chill in the air because the thermostat had been turned way down, blinds were partly opened, things on counters had been moved, the ice maker in our freezer had been emptied and turned off, all the toilet seats were up, and, to top it all off, someone had urinated in the downstairs toilet and not flushed.
Fortunately, it didn’t look like we’d been robbed (well, it kind of looked like we’d been robbed, because we had dismantled a lot of stuff for the move and the house was a mess – but nothing appeared to be missing).
I called our Realtor from the gridlock, and he in turn called our buyers’ agent to see what was going on, after confirming from the electronic lock box on our front door that the buyers’ agent was the only person to access the house while we were away.
Turns out the house was inspected while we were gone, but we didn’t know it. The buyers’ agent and home inspector had been in the house the day before. That seemed to explain everything being moved, but didn’t explain why nothing had been returned to its previous state, the courteous and professional thing to do.
About the time I got home, the buyers’ agent arrived to pick up some documents. If you know me, you know I’m going to ask why things weren’t returned to normal – and why we were never called to let us know people would be coming into the house that we still owned.
Over the course of the next half hour or so, the buyers’ agent established that none of those things happened on his watch. The buyers’ agent had visited the house three times that week including once that very day, and everything was just how we left it. I was genuinely perplexed – how could these things happen? Logic was certainly being stretched, if not defied.
So I pressed.
Turns out the buyers’ agent clearly (and graphically, until I stopped him) remembered urinating in our downstairs bathroom at 10:30 a.m. that day, but he also clearly remembered flushing (around 10:30 and a half, he said – again, TMI) and then leaving the house. Anything that changed in the house had to have been changed after that.
I was, in a word, dumbfounded.
So I asked: “You’re telling me that between 10:30 this morning and now (about 5 p.m.), someone entered my house undetected, turned off the ceiling fans, turned down the air conditioner, opened the blinds, turned off the icemaker, moved stuff around, lifted the toilet seats, and urinated in our toilet without flushing?”
His answer, with full conviction and enthusiasm: “Yes, that has to be what happened!”
I said: “Well then, I guess there must a mysterious urinater on the loose.”
My wife and kids, listening in the other room, all started laughing – which, frankly, was an inappropriate response to something as serious as some mystical being randomly urinating in others’ homes.
That pretty much ended our conversation. I mean, how could I be upset (much less pissed off) at the condition of my house and how it upset my wife when the “mysterious urinater” theory explained it. I mean really, no pun intended, what a relief.
My kids, who don’t believe in the Easter Bunny or the Boogey Man, don’t believe in the Mystery Urinater, either, although since then they’ve certainly blamed a few things on him (I’m guessing it’s a him since the toilet seats were all up, although I suppose someone that devious could be a her who tricks us by lifting the seat when she’s done).
Despite me wanting to believe the story, the logical, educated, I-wasn’t-born-yesterday part of me thinks you can rest easy and leave your toilets unsecured: the mysterious urinater theory strikes me as more of a load of crap.
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