pedantry - noun - excessive concern with minor details and rules
In this current vastness wherein political correctness rules, pedantry has pushed its way into the populace, particularly real estate attorneys. If you have been following this recent short string of blogs, you have probably figured out that I am selling my house to two nouveau yuppies, now labeled Millennials. Although they are wet behind the ears (meaning young in case that idiom escapes you), I like them. It is their legal representation that leaves little to love. Why? One word: PEDANTRY.
Okay, okay, I get it. The lawyer is doing her job, and Goodness knows that in this climate of litigiousness one with the master key to a law office has to be extra careful. But to what avail?
Case in point: As any lender must have a property surveyed before a mortgage can be offered, on Monday, an industrious set of two uniformed surveyors flagged my property in hot pink plastic price tags sans prices and measured every inch and boundary of my lot with their collection of transit levels, tripod rods, bluetooth laser distance meters, etc. Just when I thought I'd make it to the end of the game (the closing) without any more complications, two days later, I received a call from my attorney, informing me that two of my three neighbors have been encroaching on my land. One unknowingly erected a privacy fence up against my own privacy fence three feet onto my property and the other, a relatively new neighbor, put up behind my fence a children's play set, half of which is taking up four feet of the portion of my backyard that I can't see. Ugh. Getting the one neighbor to remove her fence was easy albeit I had to rely on an ex-boyfriend to do the job; however, convincing the other one that the survey was/is indeed accurate and he would have to move the one side of the swing set that his kids never use anyway, was a herculean feat. I struck out, but my real agent agents seemed to make it to first and second base. Who knows if they will manage to find their way to home plate. After much cajoling on the part of the agents, the disgruntled neighbor promised he'd move the set but was inordinately angry at the buyers, exclaiming, "That's no way to start out, bossing a new neighbor around. I know I won't ever speak to them unless they come over here with a peace offering." Perhaps he made a valid point.
Adverse possession laws aside (because they require thirty years of proven encroachment in New Jersey), I realize that the lawyer is thinking that if some child falls out of the jungle gym portion of the set, it might just be the buyers' responsibility to cover hospital fees. But isn't that what homeowner's insurance is for? If the neighbor's kids don't even use the monstrosity, is it worth starting off on the wrong foot with someone who is probably not going away for at least twenty years? I don't know about you, but I say to heck with pedantry. Messing with minutiae is just aggravating to everyone except for the one doling out the aggravation. "Don't sweat the small stuff" may not be advice that legal eagles embrace, but perhaps their clients should remind the professionals that stepping outside the bounds of pedantry and making concessions to insure domestic tranquility between neighbors may not be such a bad idea.
#word-to-words, #slice-of-life, #blog, #blogging, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing, #truth, #LiteraryCriticism, #satire, #society, #real estate, #good advice
No comments:
Post a Comment