I’m Embarrassed

He was beyond excited.

He just couldn’t show it until he left their house.

It’s 2010 just after the Global Financial Crisis, when a landscape architect is sitting in front of his clients in their Mosman home on the lower north shore of Sydney.

Their dream of having a perfectly manicured garden was urgent so they begged him to make their dull patch of dirt a high priority.

As soon as he acquiesced, he regretted it.

Almost every day for three months the husband emailed him with another instruction…” …add this, change that, move this, cut that out”

He’d never worked with such a demanding, indecisive client.

And now, all he had to do was get through the final presentation and he was out of there!

But as he rolled out the plans on their lavish dining table, the wife stopped him.

“We need to tell you something…we’re not going ahead”.

“Haha, very funny” he said as he continued taking out the plans.

“I’m not joking” she said sheepishly.

When he saw she was serious, his blood began boiling like lava.

“Why am I finding this out now?” he snapped.

It turns out, the couple had an almighty fight the previous Friday night after a few drinks and the wife made an ultimatum…

They either sell the house or divorce.

So the next morning, the husband went and saw a real estate mate of his and put the house on the market.

But on one condition…

Under no circumstance was the agent to put a ‘FOR SALE’ sign out the front of their house.

That would be too humiliating.

So the agent leaned forward and shared this with him…

“Just so you know, your house and one other in your street, are the only two NOT on the market right now”.

Apparently the husband dry reached in the agent’s office.

The economy was still coming out of recession and property prices in Mosman were down as much as 40%!

So how did it get to this?

The husband had a great corporate job and when he was made redundant, his self-esteem went with it.

So, to ‘pep’ himself up, he used his redundancy to renovate their house both inside and out.

His wife was dead against the idea until he found a new job.

But he argued a better-looking house would make him feel better and hence put him in the right frame of mind to find another job.

Unfortunately, the renos were a reflection of him. Whatever he did wasn’t good enough so kept throwing more money at them until his wife threatened him with a divorce.

The sad thing is, if he had of spoken to someone about how he felt on the ‘inside’, he wouldn’t have burnt so much money trying to fix everything on the ‘outside’.

Some men are like that, they go into their caves and stay there. You can’t even bribe them with beers.

Redundancies are on the rise again and by nature, have a very binary outcome.

They can either be a bed of roses or a big pile of compost.

It just depends on how you cultivate it.

Have a great weekend!

Adam

Back paddock – it’s easy to spend it when you’re young but hard to earn it when you’re older – Jim Munnoch

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