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CONFESSION #0652 — INSPECTION NIGHTMARE
Monday, June 29, 2026
We lost the earnest money dispute. Twelve thousand dollars gone because the buyer's inspector found knob and tube wiring in the attic and the buyer walked. Which, okay, that's their right. But here's the thing. The seller had disclosed it. Page 4 of the disclosure, line 12, check mark next to "knob and tube present in portions of home." The buyer's agent didn't read it. The buyer didn't read it. Nobody read it until the inspector said the words out loud and suddenly everyone's acting like this is new information.
The arbitration took three months. Three months of back and forth over something that was written down the whole time. The mediator ruled the disclosure was "insufficiently prominent."
The seller cried in my office. She's 74.
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Judge Reginald Escrow III
⚖️ Presiding
GUILTY OF CATASTROPHIC LITERACY FAILURE IN THE FIRST DEGREE WITH AGGRAVATED DISREGARD FOR PAGE FOUR
The Court is APOPLECTIC. Reginald has seen some things in his years on this bench — agents who confused square feet with cubic feet, buyers who thought "as-is" meant "as I wish it to be" — but this, THIS is a new low for the profession. The disclosure was RIGHT THERE. Page four, line twelve, a CHECK MARK, the universal symbol for "hey idiot, look at this." What did they want, a SINGING TELEGRAM? A man in a knob and tube costume doing interpretive dance in the foyer? The Court once ruled against a family of raccoons for failing to vacate a crawlspace in a timely manner, and even THEY demonstrated superior reading comprehension to everyone involved in this transaction except your 74-year-old seller, who did NOTHING WRONG and deserves an apology written in calligraphy and delivered by someone who has actually passed a literacy test. And this mediator — "insufficiently prominent" — oh, shall we also require disclosures be etched into the foundation in letters visible from SPACE? The Court briefly dated someone who never read restaurant menus and just pointed at pictures, and that relationship ended poorly, much like this buyer's credibility. Twelve thousand dollars, extracted from a crying elderly woman because grown adults with real estate licenses could not be bothered to READ A DOCUMENT THEY WERE LEGALLY OBLIGATED TO REVIEW. The Court finds the buyer's agent guilty, the buyer guilty, the mediator guilty of enabling nonsense, and frankly the entire concept of "insufficiently prominent" guilty of being a phrase that should never have been uttered. Reginald must now go lie down because his blood pressure medication is in the other room and Order the Roomba has blocked the hallway again.
Willful Illiteracy
Have a confession? Judge Reginald Escrow III's docket is always open.
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