RIF'd Episode 5 : These mean appraisal streets

[MUSIC]
>> It's that time again, another episode of Riftin'.
I wanna praise y'all for listening.
Thank you for coming back in.
Everybody that gave me the shout outs at the Halloween party that I wasn't at.
Thank you for that.
Thank you for coming back.
Blap, blap.
Oh, I wanna give a mention to my little puppy now.
Her name is Penny Penny, and she's probably throwing up right now.
But I gotta do the show, so I gotta let her go.
Gotta let her eat them shoes.
Today I'm gonna talk about another job I had cuz all I ever know is the things I've
done, the things I've did, the things I've think, think, the things I am.
Today, we're gonna talk about what happened after I failed out of college.
That's a different episode.
I just got my transcript though, and it's funny.
So I'm gonna go through it, and I'm gonna post it.
And you're gonna be like, what?
Why are you so dumb, Kevin?
Why?
Why are you so dumb?
But anyway, thanks again for listening.
This has been a weird start.
Let me tell you what, episode five, this is gonna be episode five.
It's gonna be episode five.
But thanks for listening.
There goes the royalty free music that I got from some website.
And thank you for tolerating the auto tune.
That was really cool.
This episode I wanna talk about my job as a real estate appraiser.
That's right, I was a real estate appraiser.
I don't know if many people know that.
But yeah, I used to go to your house, your house specifically, and
tell you how much I thought it was worth.
And it was always worth however much the loan amount was.
Pretty amazing stuff, 100% record on that.
So I wanna talk about how I got there.
How did I get to appraising fucking houses from failing out of college?
Well, let's go back a little bit.
I failed out of college and I needed a job, so
I started to work at Home Depott in Aspen Hill, Maryland, Home Depot.
I worked in the lumber department because, I don't know,
that was the department they picked for me.
So I just picked up wood, which was a talent of mine, and
I chopped it for people and put it on their cart thing.
And that was fun.
They wanted us to charge per cut.
They were like, you gotta charge 25 cents for every time you cut the wood.
I was like, I'm not doing that.
Let's just cut this shit up.
I'm cutting it for free, baby.
Fuck Home Depot.
So I did that.
And that was cool, I guess.
It was easy to work there.
They paid me $10 an hour.
I don't even know what year it was at this point.
2001, I think.
Ten bucks an hour, killing it, crushing it, Aspen Hill Home Depot.
And we had a tight knit community of workers at the Home Depot.
There was a guy from Thailand that was hilarious and
I can't remember anything about him other than that.
He was sarcastic and funny as fuck.
We had one dude that he smoked weed behind this door one day.
He was our only forklift certified person in the lumber department.
He smoked some weed.
He got on the forklift.
Always a good idea.
I think that's number one idea for forklifts is be under the influence
of anything, higher power, weed, the Second Amendment, whatever is your drug.
He got high, got in the forklift and promptly, promptly?
Backed it into the sprinkler main and flooded the entire store.
There's like multiple inches of water across the entire floor of the store,
the store floor.
And he just ran away and he never came back again.
That was his story.
He just hit the sprinkler, peaced the fuck out.
God bless that guy.
The Home Depot was interesting.
Not in that it was a Home Depot.
That's not interesting at all.
I used to just walk around the store pretending like I was helping someone
else, like you walk with purpose for like six hours a day, just going from end to
end so no one would bother me and I could get to the end of my day.
But weirdly enough, it was also, also thank you for listening to the last
episode if you did about my dead mom.
That's really cool.
That was, that was a tough one, I guess.
Ooh, there's the burp.
And weirdly enough that her, where she's buried is right across the street from
that Home Depot that I worked at.
I don't know if that's some sort of weird Freudian thing.
Why I picked that or maybe that was the only Home Depot I could get a job at.
But yeah, her cemetery is like right across the street.
It's called Gate of Heaven Cemetery, which is like that cult, I guess.
And they bury everyone in those cool Nikes.
But, you know, I never went to her grave.
I was literally right across the street, Georgia Avenue, Route 97 in Maryland.
Never went to her grave.
I'm such a piece of shit, but it's also a grave.
Like I don't really put a lot of credence, clear water into graves.
You know, it's like, it's just a body.
It's not a person anymore.
It's just a body in a metal box that you overpaid for.
So I never went there.
Weirdly enough.
Also the DC sniper.
Do you remember the DC sniper?
Okay.
So this was actually 2002 because I was working there when this happened.
I'm looking at a map.
Why wouldn't you?
A Google map of the DC sniper locations.
That's why sometimes you'll hear my mouse clicking because I'm clicking on
these little bullet points.
Like, um, a guy, two people were killed like 500 to a thousand feet away from
where I was working.
Um, one was at a gas station.
Prem Kumar Walekar, 54, a cab driver shot and killed while pumping fuel at a
mobile gas station on Aspen Hill Road in Rockville, Maryland.
And then there was another guy, a bus driver, Conrad Johnson.
We love you Conrad 35, a bus driver shot and killed on his bus by the
fucking sniper people.
And I was working there.
Now it was weird because my girlfriend at the time, her mom was super terrified
to get that she was going to get killed by the DC sniper.
This was like a thing that took over the psyche of the entire region.
She made her husband go pump her gas because he was shooting people at gas
stations like you know, I need gas and I need it you to get it.
So if we get, if you get shot and die, it's not me.
So that was Home Depot.
Um, and at that point, when I was working at Home Depot, living in Maryland,
I was still living with my dad.
I was like almost 21, I think, because I was born in 82.
So I would have been 21 the next month.
Um, from these snipings, maybe like 20 days.
So I was wrapping up my career there.
I didn't know what I was going to do.
My dad, he was like, okay, when you turn 21, when you turn 21, that's how he
said, he sounds like Yoda.
When 21 you turn.
He was going to kick me out of the house, which good for him.
What am I even, what was I even doing?
I know that's like a low number now, like zoomers are like 21.
You're a baby.
You're a little baby.
Can't kick you out.
So he's going to kick me out of the house and I didn't have a plan.
I toyed around with the idea of living with my buddy, George, you know, the one
that I didn't tell my mom died when we went fishing, uh, I was maybe going to
live with him, but the rent was like really high at the time.
I feel like it was going to be something stupid.
Like it was probably only like $500 a month.
That was well beyond my reach.
So I backed out of that.
They ended up having to find another roommate.
It was going to be like three guys living in this, this rancher near DC.
And it wouldn't be, it wouldn't have been good.
I don't think I would have liked it.
So I was sort of running out of options, running on empty and I didn't have
anywhere to go except my uncle Terry, because this is more of a podcast about
nepotism, I think more than anything.
My uncle Terry, um, my mom's brother extended me an offer.
He said, you can come up, you can move to New Jersey.
You can work for me, baby.
And I said, okay, let's do that.
Fuck Home Depot.
So I just walked out of Home Depot and then I came back like a week later to get my last
check and I never told anyone I quit.
And that was it.
And I moved to New Jersey, Delran, New Jersey.
If you're filling out my security questions, um, which is sort of like South
Jersey is across the river from Philadelphia.
It's kind of a blue collar town.
Not a whole lot going on in Delran.
Delran is actually like the nicer part.
There's a town called riverside, which is, I know this is going to blow your mind,
but it's like right on the river.
That's more ghetto than Delran.
So I moved up to my uncle Terry's house and he was a real estate appraiser.
He's licensed, fully licensed, real estate appraiser in this great state of
Nuevo Jersey, which I don't know if y'all are familiar with New Jersey, but it
gets a lot of hate and I don't necessarily think it deserves that.
What do people say?
What do people not like about New Jersey?
Right.
They don't like the turnpike.
Really, I think it's, they don't like that they make you pay to use their roads,
which I can, you know, I'd fuck those roads, but they aren't the whole state.
New Jersey is a very diverse state.
I think geographically it's got a lot going for it.
And that's a big factor, right?
I mean, you have, they have the ocean, the shore.
That's not a Jersey accent, whatever.
They have the shore.
They have, they have like mountains in the top part, the North part.
They've got the Delaware river.
They've got pizza and lots of people live there and it's right by New York.
And you know, it's got a lot of trees and it's pretty a lot of time.
Like their fall, fall in New Jersey is great.
They do have some weird things they do.
Like you don't turn, there's no like left-hand turns on a lot of roads.
You have to use a jug handle, which is like this weird off ramp.
If you want to make a left, you like have to make a right and go around
the jug handle to go left.
It's, it's bonkers.
It's just like a lot more road out there.
So I moved to New Jersey with my uncle, uncle Terry.
Uncle Terry was married to aunt Eileen and I had two cousins.
I'm not going to say their names.
I don't know.
And let's just leave them out of this.
And I didn't have a place to live, so they let me live and sleep on their couch,
which I slept on for a very long time.
Not like in one day.
I just get an email.
Cool.
It's spam.
Not, I didn't, I mean, I didn't, I slept there for years.
I slept on this fucking couch.
Not really selling myself here.
You shouldn't listen to this podcast.
Oh cool.
He slept on a couch.
What's next?
Did he play the, did he play Kino?
I never, I've never played Kino.
I slept on their couch and I worked in their appraisal outfit,
which was run out of the basement of their house.
And it was interesting, you know, because I think houses are fun.
I like to look at houses on Zillow and be like, gee, look at that house.
That's sure a nice house.
Wow. Look at that door.
Side lights? My God.
Where this is peak entertainment.
I fuck, I love looking at houses.
I can't help it.
So, hey, I would get paid to do it.
I would, you know, we would have people.
Most of our work was people that were applying to refinance their mortgage.
And the bank needs to know the value of the house before they give you money.
So we would go out there and take pictures of the house and walk through it
and measure it.
And I had my little wheel.
I'd measure the house.
Get that square footage and come back
to the office and fill out some forms and compare it to other houses
and a comparative match.
Wait. Oh, God, what's it called?
Like it's like you pair them up.
You know, they're called comps.
You're like, look at the comps.
Well, if you look at the comps, there's always some motherfucker that's like,
well, if you look at the comps in my neighborhood,
my house is actually worth a trillion dollars.
And then it's cool when you're an appraiser because you get to say shit.
Like, that's not even a comp.
OK, get that out of here.
That's it. That's an active listing.
And you get to be mean to people sometimes.
Well, if you look at the cops, it's usually realtors.
Here's the cops. And I'm like, thank you.
I will promptly throw these in the trash and do my own work.
So I was working out of the basement and the way it worked was
Uncle Terry was obviously the key appraiser signatory man.
He would sign off on all the deals.
He would read all the reports and make sure that they weren't stupid.
And I would go out and see the houses.
I was sort of the field guy.
And I would go just drive around New Jersey for eight hours a day in my car
and just know what else would you drive it in?
You idiot.
I drive around New Jersey in my car and go to these houses
and take pictures of the houses.
You always had to have like a front back street photo, interior
photos if the lender requested it.
And, you know, talk to the homeowners and they would tell me everything
great that they did to their house.
And I was essentially like, I don't really care.
I mean, like at some point, it doesn't matter what you did
because you live in a neighborhood that you chose to live in.
And that neighborhood is more what dictates the value of your house
more than anything. Right. It's like location.
I've heard it said three times, one time location, location.
And then I think there was a third one.
And that's important, guys.
So when you buy a house.
I mean, what the old adage was like
by the worst house in the best neighborhood you could afford.
I don't know if that's necessarily the best practice.
I would say by the second worst house in the best neighborhood you can afford.
So I would drive around and visit these homes and I'd see I saw so many cool houses.
New Jersey has a lot of diversity in the housing stock.
It also has a lot of houses that are exactly the same, like,
you know, Cape Cod built in the 1950s.
There will be a trillion of those.
And you can just bang them out, bang them out, baby.
Yeah, they got asbestos all up and then shit.
But it doesn't matter because so does every other house in the neighborhood.
And that was a blast.
They paid me fifty dollars a house.
And I loved just being alone.
I'm kind of a loner in a lot of ways, like my loan time and.
Being in my car and just like I had a MP3 CD player
where you could burn all your MP3s to CD, so you didn't have to do like
you don't have to burn a normal CD anymore, which is great.
You can now put a thousand fucking songs, maybe not a thousand.
You can put a lot of songs on one CD.
And I would just, you know, listen to that, had it with through the case,
the cassette adapter, and I would just rock out and look at my printed out
map quest directions to the next house, you know, because you had to plan your route.
And I wasn't trying to drive extra miles.
So my workday was like, here's all the addresses I have to hit.
And here's the route I'm going to take to do it most efficiently.
And that was great.
Just going house to house.
You spend a day on the road and then you spend a day in the office,
writing all the reports, doing all the appraisals and finding all the comps
and, you know, and logging into the multiple listing system
and really finding some good shit. And.
It was fun.
It had the job part was not the bad part.
The bad part was that I was living at Uncle Terry's house,
which came with its own problems.
Hmm. I just spilled coffee on myself.
Hold on. Pause. Pause. All right.
We're back. I just used my shirt to clean up the laptop with coffee on it.
And now my shirt is wet with coffee, but we're better off than we were.
So I would go around New Jersey.
And like I said, North Jersey is a beautiful country.
I like to drive and I'm there, but it was kind of a long drive.
So you spend a lot of time on the turnpike.
A lot of time listening to random radio stations.
I spent time in good neighborhoods.
I spent time in really bad neighborhoods.
And it was great.
Me and my map quests and Baja Fresh, the restaurant had hit the scene.
And suddenly I just Baja Fresh was fucking good.
And I don't care who you are.
They had a fixings bar and they had big burritos.
And I was a fat kid in a car appraising houses.
Twenty one year old, 22 year old kid.
And it was the dream, you know, getting to see all these nice houses one time.
You know, you would do like these million, these multimillion dollar houses.
They're cool. They're a bitch to measure.
They're very annoying as shit to actually do
the appraisal for.
But it's cool to like walk through the house and see it.
Sometimes new construction was really cool to do
because they would just give you the keys and there's no one even living there yet.
So you could just go in there and like be one of the first people to poop
in the toilet there, because let me tell you what,
bathrooms are hard to come by in appraisal then.
You don't want to just take a dump.
Man, we're getting graphic here at one of your customers, clients,
whoever's houses, homeowners, how's like you're not I'm not that guy.
OK, I'm not going to use your bathroom and just like ruin it.
So if it's new construction, though, game on, baby.
Um, you know, and then another weird thing about New Jersey is
there's a whole portion called the Pine Barrens,
which is sort of like in the in the middle ish bit of New Jersey.
And it's like it's essentially a desert.
It's just a giant pine forest in sand.
The ground is sand and it's just pine trees and
like driving out to from the west side of New Jersey,
like the Philadelphia side to the beach.
You'll be on the road and be like, there's not a gas station for 30 miles.
There's a sign.
The gas station for 30 miles.
Well, guess what? That also means there's no bathrooms.
So I'm not proud to admit that I have gone to the bathroom
in the Pine Barrens and wiped my butt with subway napkins.
But it wasn't a common occurrence, but sometimes when you're eating
a lot of junk food and in the car all day, your bowels aren't the most agreeable.
OK, it happened.
I'm not proud of it, but it's something that happened in my life.
That's really
everything in this podcast.
One time I appraised this lady's house and she had like a thousand cats,
maybe not a thousand, but more than a hundred.
And the whole room, like every room, just smelled like cat pee.
And there are cats everywhere.
And she was just this old lady, lived by herself with all these cats.
And then she had these giant
Rubbermaid containers that she fashioned as litter boxes in every single room.
And she there weren't cleaned out.
They're like the big tub Rubbermaids, however many gallons are.
30 gallon. Full of cat poop.
And even though the house was a wreck,
it was still like a five hundred thousand dollar house
just by virtue of where it was located.
Like, even if you had to tear the thing down, it would still be worth a lot,
which was it's just mind blowing.
But this was also, you know, I appraised houses from like 2002 to 2008.
And I don't know if you guys were around for that, but
real estate values were kind of nuts getting up into 2008.
But and I think I contributed to that greatly.
Appraising all these houses in New Jersey.
New Jersey was one of the hottest real estate markets.
So like, why buy the houses?
Don't worry about the taxes in New Jersey are insane.
Property taxes are very high.
It's like living where I live now compared to the property
taxes in New Jersey is just like night and day.
You know, you have a crappy house.
It's like eight thousand dollars a year there.
And our around here, that'd be, you know, over a million dollar house.
Yeah, it was weird.
The cat lady's house was rough. Man, that stank.
I did another quarter person's house
where the entire house is like a house built in 1900.
You know, look like a regular farmhouse, sort of two story colonial.
The entire house was filled with newspapers from floor to ceiling.
And there was just like a path that this guy created
through the newspapers in each room.
It's like this place, the fucking tinderbox.
He had a toilet in the backyard.
You know, it was kind of a junkie house, but the inside was immaculately
stacked newspapers, and I just wanted like.
Flip a match like, what are you doing?
You're not even reading them.
I don't I get like it's a mental disorder, but
at least read the newspapers.
Do you think he read them? I don't.
I don't think you read them.
So that was weird.
But the weirdest part, the most difficult part,
I think about that job was actually working with my aunt Eileen.
And my uncle Terry, uncle Terry is great.
He is just a big guy, is like six foot four.
Loved golf, loved weed.
He introduced me to weed. I didn't smoke weed until I was 25.
It was with him.
He actually, when he was a kid, he used to roll joints
for the neighborhood drug dealer and get like 10 cents a joint.
And that was his job.
He just rolled joints for this guy.
So he was really good at rolling joints, which is great,
because I cannot do that.
Like, it always looks like a broken
child's femur or something.
It's just horrible.
They're not good.
So he was great at it.
And his wife was was is
this is how bad of a nephew I am.
I'm pretty sure she's still alive.
She is a hot mess.
She's an alcoholic.
She was a nurse, and I guess she stopped being a nurse
to run this appraisal business out of their basement.
So it was really her in the basement of this split level house.
It's not a very big basement.
There's no carpet.
There's a, you know, a drop ceilings of the foam drop ceiling.
And she would just answer the phones and chain smoke
Virginia Slims down there.
And she only had like three albums that she would listen to.
One of them was this Rod Stewart album.
And I just Googled it.
I took a little break.
It's Rod Stewart, As Time Goes By, the Great American Songbook Volume Two.
I think I know every single song on that album.
She just listened to that on repeat.
She had like a crappy little CD player, and she would listen to that,
smoke her Virginia Slims and make phone calls to our homeowners
and try to book appointments.
And that was what she did.
And she was an alcoholic.
So she was drinking these little Sutter Home bottles like she would just
have them all over the house.
So as the day wore on, as the Virginia Slims and Sutter Home took its toll,
she became just a kind of nasty to everyone.
And she had this martyr complex and it was just horrible.
And I'm sleeping on their fucking couch like a schmuck.
Like, what am I doing living in this house with the alcoholic lady
who one time she fell down the stairs like my uncle wasn't near her at all.
I'm going to stand for him right now.
Stan. She was like, you pushed me.
She got all crazy. You pushed me.
How could you do that?
I thought you loved me.
And it's just like, oh, my God, these crazy fights that they would have.
And it was just so hard to deal with.
At one point, we had like a shock and awe campaign
because they tried to get her to stop drinking.
She never would.
So at one point, me and the cousins and Uncle Terry,
we would like go through the house when she wasn't around
and take all her little bottles of wine because they were everywhere.
She was like a squirrel.
And we would throw them out, dump them down the sink and shit like that.
But it was a it's a Pyrrhic victory.
There's no stopping that.
I mean, she would just go buy more wine.
They you can't force someone like that to change, right?
It has to come from within.
And we weren't doing a good job at that.
The just taking away someone's drugs does not work.
So I lived with them for a long time and.
I obviously didn't have a girlfriend, you know, I'm sleeping on a couch.
I don't why I didn't have anything.
I had a computer that I played video games on.
Counterstrike still love you.
I don't love you anymore.
And I had a car.
And that was basically it.
I didn't do anything.
I just hung out and, you know, listen to them fight
and appraised houses and saved my money up.
I had a bunch of money saved up because I had nothing to spend it on.
I didn't pay rent because I'm a shitbag sleeping on my uncle's couch.
And it was such a weird time for me.
And I felt like I was going to be stuck there forever.
I had no motivation to not be there.
I was super. I gained so much weight like my uncle.
And I he ultimately not I.
My uncle got diagnosed with colon cancer.
And while he was sort of deep in the throes of depression
about having colon cancer, we would eat like a mini cheesecake
from Safeway, cherry covered cheesecake.
We would each eat one every day.
So I got to probably almost 300 pounds.
I was like, I didn't even know I was fat because I never exerted myself.
So this this guy living on a couch, no idea that I was fat.
And then one time we went to a hotel in the hotel at a scale.
I was like, I wonder what I weigh.
And I stepped on. I was like two fifty five.
Like, oh, I was not prepared for that number and I have to make a change.
So this also coincided with the real estate market kind of taking a shit.
And the money just dried up, right, because I was getting paid
per house that I was appraising.
So the money wasn't coming in.
I needed a new job because I hated living with them.
And that is when I sort of like decided to take my computer skills.
He's got computer skills
and he's going to use them to get a job somewhere else.
And I applied to places and I finally ended up getting a job
working for a help desk at a mortgage company.
I was like, yeah, I can do that.
And I've got some relationship to real estate and maybe I can use that to
cajole the hiring manager into getting me a job there.
And that's what that's what I did, you know.
And as for Uncle Terry, ultimately, you know, he had like his bowel was resected.
He had a colostomy bag and it didn't he took it in stride.
His bag would explode a lot.
We all get used to the smell of the exploded colostomy bag.
But I mean, you know, he he he went with it.
He was a good sport about it.
One time he took his colostomy bag out and like rested it on my cousin's shoulder
when she wasn't paying attention at the dinner table and she flipped out.
And that was a weird, traumatic incident, but also really funny at the same time.
I feel bad for laughing because she's crying because she's had a warm
colostomy bag on her shoulder.
But in the end, you know, he had he's just fucking around.
He is he seemed like an all right dad.
And he was eventually cleared.
He he was deemed cancer free.
But then he got sick.
They were vacationing in Florida.
He got sick and they gave him like a he had a bad drug interaction.
He just died in the hospital.
He was cancer free.
But Florida claimed him because that's what Florida does.
It ruins everything.
And, you know, that's my real estate appraisal life.
And I I liked it.
I feel like it was a great career while it lasted.
I wouldn't want to keep doing it, but it was fun.
Not a lot of good times.
If you guys want me to appraise your house,
they know I can't legally do that.
But thank you for legally listening.
To this podcast.
Um, we love you here.
And I think next time I'm going to have a guest,
I'm trying to line these guests up.
I'm not very good at it.
This, you know, we're working on it.
It's a work in progress.
But thanks for listening.
I hope you chuckled a bit.
This was a longer one.
This is the longest episode yet.
So if you made it to the end, fuck yes.
Yaz Queen.
We're going to come back next time and maybe talk about my college.
I got the transcript.
And like I said, it's special.
I paid eight dollars for this college transcript,
and I think I'm going to have a guest and maybe we'll go through it.
Because that would be funnier.
All right. Talk to you all later.
See you.
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