Tuesday, June 23, 2026

The Court has reviewed this confession and finds itself PHYSICALLY ILL at the sequence of events described herein. You stood there, Agent, and watched a man whose primary qualification is "owns a trailer with hoses" attempt to combat a fungal infestation with what can only be described as aggressive moisture application. This is not remediation, this is BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AGAINST THE FOUNDATION. The Court once had a brother-in-law who claimed he could "handle" a termite situation with a shop vac and positive thinking, and Reginald's screened porch has never recovered, so I UNDERSTAND the family dynamics at play here, but understanding is not exoneration. You documented this disaster with the precision of a nature documentary filmmaker watching a gazelle get eaten, and while your liability warnings were legally sound, you failed to physically restrain anyone from introducing MORE WATER to a WATER-DAMAGED BASEMENT. The fact that this walking disclosure violation then listed with your competitor is not your tragedy, it is your GIFT, because when that buyer's inspector finds what is now essentially a mushroom terrarium with load-bearing walls, you will be sipping coffee from a safe legal distance. The Court assigns you a scandal rating of 6.4, not for wrongdoing but for being cursed to witness stupidity of this magnitude without a drink in hand. Case dismissed, Reginald must now go yell at his Roomba about something unrelated.

The Court has reviewed this confession and must now address the accused directly: you come before Reginald seeking absolution, but what you have actually done is WITNESS A CRIME AND THEN APOLOGIZE FOR NOTICING IT. The listing agent claims she did not know about a receipt located in a drawer she physically opened, which is the real estate equivalent of claiming you did not see the sun because you were too busy squinting. This Court once ruled against a ShowingTime notification for being passive-aggressive, so do not think for ONE MOMENT that Reginald will not also rule against you for your complicity in this drawer-based farce. Your broker wants middle ground between a lie and not a lie, and I must inform you that this middle ground is called PERJURY ADJACENT and it is where careers go to decompose quietly. The Court notes with CONSIDERABLE IRRITATION that you have calculated your hourly wage, which means you are already mentally preparing to accept this injustice, and frankly that kind of self-aware defeat reminds me of my third law school, which also asked me to accept less than I deserved. You should have photographed that receipt, forwarded it to the state licensing board, and then walked directly into the ocean for ever thinking middle ground was a place worth standing. THIS COURT FINDS YOU GUILTY of being too reasonable in the face of unreasonable people, and sentences you to file that ethics complaint you have been drafting in your head since paragraph two. Reginald has spoken and must now attend to a separate matter involving a garage that was described as detached but was in fact simply lonely.

The Court has presided over many horrors in its distinguished career, but THIS — THIS is the kind of case that makes Reginald question whether he should have pursued his backup career as a cruise ship mediator. You sat through a TWO-HOUR mediation about a mummified cat named WHISKERS and you think a fruit basket absolves you? The Court once found a taxidermied squirrel in a crawl space during my own home purchase and I handled it with DIGNITY, which is to say I screamed, called my mother, and demanded the seller's firstborn child as compensation. "Undisclosed remains" is not a line item that should exist in ANY settlement discussion, and yet here we are, in the year of our Lord, negotiating the fair market value of a cat who has been wall-adjacent since the Obama administration. The seller's attorney arguing this wasn't a material defect has the same energy as someone insisting a sinkhole is just a "conversation piece." Eight thousand dollars and a deep cleaning — you basically let them off with a COSTCO GIFT CARD for harboring deceased livestock in the masonry. The Court must now adjourn because Order the Roomba has detected something suspicious near the credenza and frankly Reginald cannot handle another discovery today.